The Ultimate Cognitive Upgrade: The OC Thinking Skills Accelerator (2026 Test)

With the May 2026 Opportunity Class (OC) Placement Test on the horizon, this is a golden opportunity to gain a true competitive advantage. We understand that families are busy, which is why we’ve created the upgraded Thinking Skills Accelerator: a flexible, powerful programme designed to fit your schedule. This isn’t a live course with rigid timings; it’s a collection of 10 intensive, 30-minute on-demand masterclasses, each engineered to install the specific mental models required to solve the most complex OC questions with speed and precision. Your child can learn and practise at a time that best suits your family, turning potential downtime into a period of incredible growth.

Our Guiding Philosophy: Schemas, Not Tricks

Why do bright students get questions wrong? It’s rarely due to a lack of intelligence. It’s because they lack the correct mental models (schemas) to categorise and attack unfamiliar problems. Our entire methodology is built on installing these schemas, moving beyond simple tricks to provide a lasting cognitive upgrade. We begin by eliminating the #1 enemy of performance: construct-irrelevant reading load. Many questions are intentionally buried in long, descriptive text. We teach students to apply a Claim-Evidence-Warrant (CEW) parsing filter, allowing them to instantly identify the question’s core structure and ignore the distracting noise. This single skill saves critical time and mental energy.

The 10 Masterclasses: A Deep Dive into the Core Constructs

Our curriculum is organised around the five core thinking constructs the OC paper actually tests. Each masterclass is a deep dive into one specific area, paired with distractor-aware homework that turns common traps into triggers for the correct strategy.

Construct 1: Data Reasoning

• Masterclass: Graph Sense, Not Guesswork. Students learn to normalise data and hard-wire the schema for percent-of-a-changing-whole problems. This prevents the common error of comparing percentages from different totals.
• Masterclass: Tables to Equations. We teach students how to translate complex tables and word problems into simple, solvable equations, ensuring they can extract and manipulate data with precision.

Construct 2: Argumentation

• Masterclass: Rapid CEW Parsing. This lesson focuses on identifying the core components of an argument (Claim, Evidence, Warrant) to instantly determine if a statement strengthens, weakens, or is irrelevant to a conclusion.
• Masterclass: The Fallacy Lab. We build immunity to the most common logical fallacies, including circularity, equivocation, and converse/inverse errors. Your child will learn to spot a flawed argument from a mile away.

Construct 3: Spatial Logic

• Masterclass: Spatial Anchoring. To solve complex 3D rotation and net problems, we teach feature anchoring—focusing on unique corners or T-junctions that remain constant during rotation. This simple technique makes mirror-image distractors obvious.
• Masterclass: Pattern Synthesis. Students learn to deconstruct 2D grid and shape progressions, identifying the underlying rules of transformation, rotation, and addition/subtraction to predict the next step in a sequence.

Construct 4: Constraint Logic

• Masterclass: Constraint Grids. For complex logic puzzles (like seating arrangements or scheduling), we teach students to use a scratch grid. This allows them to visually track multiple constraints, prune possibilities, and systematically deduce the only correct solution.
• Masterclass: Time & Windows. This lesson installs the schemas for interval intersection, essential for solving problems about overlapping schedules or multi-day validity windows.

Construct 5: Sequential & Rate-Based Reasoning

• Masterclass: Directed-Path Thinking. For map and network problems, we teach students to think in terms of directed paths, automatically accounting for one-way streets or specific travel conditions.
• Masterclass: Probability Reflexes. We automate the complement reflex for “at least one” probability questions (P(at least one) = 1 − P(none)), a much faster and more accurate method than counting individual cases.