For parents · Primary & PSLE math
We tagged 709 PSLE questions six ways. Here is what we found.
"Most tested" is a phrase people throw around. I wanted us to earn it, so we counted every question, by hand, and wrote down exactly how.
Mrs Eileen Toh
Founder & Curriculum Architect · ex-MOE · 5 min read · Updated 22 Jun 2026
When a tuition centre tells you a topic is "most tested", it is fair to ask the obvious question back: most tested by whose count, against what, and how do you know? I have read enough marketing to be suspicious of the phrase myself. So before we ever put it on a page, we decided to do the boring, honest thing and actually count.
Here is exactly what we did, so you can judge the claim for yourself.
What we counted, and how
We took every PSLE Math paper from 2012 to 2025, plus the MOE Specimen, and tagged all 709 questions: 664 from the fourteen papers actually sat, plus 45 from the Specimen, which we count separately. That separation matters, and I will come back to why.
Each question was labelled six ways: its topic, its sub-topic, the thinking move it rewards, the structure it fits (one of ten question types), its difficulty, and how confident we were in the call. The last tag is the one most people skip. We kept it because honesty means recording where a question sat on a line between two categories, rather than pretending every call was clean.
Questions tagged
every one, by hand, from the real papers and the Specimen
Ways each one was labelled
topic, sub-topic, thinking move, structure, difficulty, confidence
Sat papers, plus the Specimen
the Specimen counted separately, never blended into the totals
Then we counted, and a few things stood out
Once every question carried its six tags, the counting was simple arithmetic. A few headline findings came straight out of it, each one a count and nothing fancier.
- Geometry is the most-tested structure, at 87 questions. Not by a whisker either, it sits clearly ahead of the field.
- Fractions is the most-tested content area, at 78 questions, and it turned up in every one of the fourteen years.
- Three structures appear in every Paper 2, every year: Area and Perimeter, Volume and Rate, and Geometry, across all fourteen years we counted.
- The paper is not simply getting harder. The average difficulty stayed in a band of about 2.4 to 2.7 every year, not a steady climb.
None of these are predictions. They are descriptions of papers that have already been sat. That is the whole point of counting rather than guessing: it tells you where the marks have reliably lived, so you can prepare for the topics that show up as a near-certainty rather than the ones that merely feel scary.
Why this is more than a tidy spreadsheet
It would be easy to file all this away as a data project. It is not, for us. This is the same analysis that shapes what we teach, and we write and publish our own, 60+ textbooks and 40+ workbooks, built on it. When a structure shows up in every Paper 2 for fourteen years running, it earns more pages in our material, not because it is fashionable, but because the count says so.
If you want the order of every topic and the full picture behind these headlines, our pillar guide to the most-tested PSLE math topics lays it all out. And if you would rather see what the hardest of these questions actually look like, worked from the figure to the answer, our hardest PSLE questions hub walks through real examples.