Racing against the clock AKA the hasty reader
What the OECD found
Every three years the OECD tests 15-year-olds around the world. The 2025 results, published in September, showed reading scores in rich countries still falling, and falling faster than before. Australia is among the countries heading down.
The OECD's head of education, Andreas Schleicher, points to a growing group of test-takers he calls "hasty readers": students who race through the literacy assessment and get many of the answers wrong. His explanation is screens. Children raised on phones and short-form video get far less practice making sense of long, complex texts, and it shows up as speed without understanding.
We see the same thing in nine-year-olds, and it costs them somewhere unexpected
The OC and Selective tests are sat on a screen, against a clock. We looked at how children use that clock across roughly 1,800 full-length OC practice tests sat on Sharp Minds Club, and the pattern the OECD describes is already there at Year 3 and Year 4.
More than half of OC Reading tests were finished using less than half the allotted time. That alone would be a curiosity. What matters is where the speed shows up in the scores, and it isn't where you'd expect.
In Reading itself, fast finishers score about the same as everyone else. In Mathematical Reasoning, the children who submit with more than half the time still on the clock finish in the bottom half of scores 78% of the time. The children who use nearly all of it finish in the bottom half only 32% of the time.
Hasty reading isn't a reading problem. The OC Maths test is also a reading test: every question is a short passage before it's a calculation, and a child who has learned to skim gets through the maths quickly and gets it wrong.
What it means for preparation
The instinct is to tell a child to slow down, which rarely works. What does work is practising in the real format, with the real clock visible, often enough that the child learns what the time is for: reading the whole question, checking the answer, going back to anything flagged.
That is why every test on Sharp Minds Club runs on the real time limits, and why we show parents how much of the time was used, not just the score. When a result is lower than expected, time used is the first thing we look at.
Photo by Atakan Narman on Unsplash