What is ASET, and how does it decide selective-school entry in WA?
ASET is the Academic Selective Entrance Test the WA Department of Education runs every March for entry to the gifted and talented academic programs. It has four components: Reading Comprehension, Quantitative Reasoning, Abstract Reasoning and Writing. Year 6 students sat it on 7 March 2026 for Year 7 entry in 2027, and Year 8 entry sitters on 8 March 2026.
Written by Hari Ravichandran, Founder and Principal Tutor. Updated 13 September 2026
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Who sits it, and when
ASET is sat by students applying for a place in a gifted and talented academic program at a WA public secondary school. The main round is Year 6 students applying for Year 7, and there is a smaller round for students applying to enter in Year 9.
The test runs in March, roughly a year before the student would start. Applications close months earlier, in the term before the test, and the Department publishes the closing date and the test date together each year. Missing the application window is the single most common way a family loses the chance, and no amount of preparation fixes it.
Parents often call it "the GATE test". GATE is the program; ASET is the test that selects for it.
The four components
The four components are sat in one session on the test day. The Department publishes the exact time allowed for each section in its test information sheet for that year, and it can change, so we do not restate it here. What does not change is the mix of skills, and how Everest Tutoring splits a 2.5-hour weekly class across them.
| Component | What it asks the student to do | Time in an Everest class each week |
|---|---|---|
| Reading Comprehension | Read unfamiliar passages, including non-fiction and poetry, and answer inference questions where the answer is implied rather than stated | 30 minutes |
| Quantitative Reasoning | Solve numerical and logical problems, many of them set in tables, graphs, maps or patterns rather than as bare arithmetic | 30 minutes |
| Abstract Reasoning | Find the rule in a sequence of shapes or figures and apply it to pick what comes next | 30 minutes |
| Writing | Produce one extended piece to a prompt, judged on ideas, structure, vocabulary and control of language | 1 hour |
How a score turns into an offer
Each component is marked, combined into an overall score, and ranked against every other student who sat the test. Places are then offered from the top down until each program is full, which is why there is a cut-off rather than a pass mark. In 2026 the selective-entry cut-off was 209.5.
Everest Tutoring counted 75% of its 2026 GATE students above that cut-off, with 103 offers and a top score of 286.07. Counted from students enrolled in an Everest GATE class who sat ASET in March 2026 and shared their result with us.
Because the cut-off moves with the cohort each year, a family cannot work backwards from last year's number to a target. The useful target is the student's weakest component, since the overall score is the sum of four.
What preparation actually changes
Two of the four components reward practice heavily. Abstract Reasoning is a learnable rule-finding skill that most Year 5 students have never been taught, and Writing improves fastest of all because it is the component where feedback is worth the most.
Reading Comprehension improves more slowly, and it improves with the volume and difficulty of what a child reads rather than with worksheets. Quantitative Reasoning sits in between: the arithmetic is school-level, but the question shapes are not.
Sources: WA Department of Education, gifted and talented programs · Everest GATE results 2026 method
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