The final week before the OC test: should we still be practising?
The instinct to cram, and why it doesn’t help now
In the last seven days before the OC test, almost every parent feels the same pull. The test is finally close enough to feel real, and the natural response is to do more. More practice tests. More questions. More late-night review sessions at the kitchen table.
It makes sense. The stakes feel high, and you’ve still got time.
The trouble is that cramming in the final week works against the way ten-year-olds actually perform on test day. By this point, the knowledge your child has is what they have. The unfamiliar question types they haven’t seen yet aren’t going to be mastered in seven days, no matter how many hours you put in. What cramming does instead is build fatigue, sap confidence, and lift the anxiety to a level your child has to manage on the morning of the test.
A tired, anxious child performs worse than a rested, confident one. That’s true at any age, and it’s especially true for primary-aged children who don’t yet have the emotional regulation to keep performing through stress.
What the final week should actually look like
Think of the last week as a taper rather than a sprint. Athletes do this before a big event. They don’t train harder; they train less. They protect their energy, sharpen their routine, and arrive at the start line fresh.
A good final week looks something like this:
- Light, focused review of questions they’ve already done. A mix of confidence builders and questions they got wrong with the full explanations so that they can understand how to get to the right answer.
- One final timed practice test, ideally early in the week, not the day before. The point isn’t to learn anything new. It’s to confirm that the routine of sitting through the test is familiar, and to give your child a recent experience of finishing a test and feeling fine. We recommend doing this in their strongest subject.
- No new question types, no new strategies, and no new resources introduced this week. If something is going to surprise them, you want it to be on test day, not in a panic on the Wednesday before.
What to do instead of more practice
The time you’d otherwise spend cramming is better spent on three things.
First, sleep. The single biggest performance lever in the final week is the amount of sleep your child gets in the three nights before the test. Push bedtime earlier than usual, not later. If your child doesn’t fall asleep until 10pm, that’s normal in the final week — the brain is processing. The point is to be in bed, lights off, screens off, by a sensible hour.
Second, routine. Walk through what test day will look like, in detail, more than once. What time will they wake up? What will they eat for breakfast? What will they wear? When will you leave the house? Where exactly is the test centre? What happens when you arrive? Children find unknowns much more stressful than adults do, and most test-day anxiety is anxiety about the unfamiliar, not the test itself. Take the unknowns away.
Third, the conversation. At some point this week, talk to your child about the work they’ve put in. Not in a heavy way. Just a casual acknowledgement. “You’ve done a lot of practice. Whatever happens on the day, you’ve put the work in.” Children this age are extraordinary at picking up on parental anxiety, and they need to hear that you trust their preparation.
Two specific things worth reviewing
If you’re going to spend any focused time on test content this week, spend it on two things rather than the content itself.
The first is timing strategy. Make sure your child knows roughly how much time they should be spending per question in each section. The rule of thumb is 60 seconds on any given question. If they feel like they’re getting stuck, it’s better to move.
The second is the skip-and-come-back habit. The single biggest mistake able children make on the OC test is getting stuck on a hard question early, burning four or five minutes on it, and running out of time at the end. The instruction is simple: if a question is taking too long, mark it, move on, and come back if there’s time. Practising that habit on a few warm-up questions during the week is more useful than another full mock test.
The most important week was actually the week before this one
Here’s the slightly hard truth. The final week before the OC test is not where strong performances are made. They’re made in the months before. By the time you’re seven days out, the work is largely done.
What the final week can do is protect the work that’s been put in — or undo it. A calm, well-rested, confident child walking into the test will outperform a knowledgeable but exhausted, anxious one almost every time.
So the answer to “should we still be practising?” is yes, but lightly, and with a different goal. Not to learn more. To feel ready.
If your child has been preparing on OC Test Prep, our personalised plans are built with this philosophy for the final week. Of course you can do more, but it’s not what we recommend.
Relax, stay calm and trust the work that your child has already done.