Tochigi Public High School Entrance Examination - Science

It combines multiple choice, short written responses, longer written explanations, calculations and questions that require reading graphs, tables or described experimental setups. Questions are set in Japanese and answers must be written in Japanese. The official examination body publishes the current paper structure and any changes; confirm the details there.

Timing and marks are set by the prefecture and can change between years, so the official body's site is the only reliable place to confirm the current figure. Do not plan your pacing from older prep books. As a rule, science papers reward moving steadily and leaving time to return to calculation items.

It is a selection test, so it goes beyond simple recall. Most items are solvable from the standard curriculum, but several require applying a concept to an unfamiliar experiment or graph. The hard part is usually not obscure content but precision: units, significant figures, correct terminology and explaining why a result occurred.

Public high school selection in Tochigi generally runs once per year for the main intake, with separate arrangements for some recruitment. Retake and reapplication rules are administrative matters that change, so check the prefecture's current guidelines. If you are unsuccessful, options such as later recruitment or private schools may exist.

Start with chemistry and physics fundamentals, because they underpin calculation questions and are hardest to cram. Build the vocabulary and standard procedures for each domain, then move to biology and earth science, which reward organised recall. Finish with cross-domain practice on experiments and graphs, where marks are most often lost.

Common causes are describing what happened instead of explaining why, omitting the control or variable being changed, misreading a graph axis, and giving an answer that is true in general but does not fit the data shown. Practise writing short explanations that name the principle, apply it to the setup and state the conclusion.

Yes, particularly in physics and chemistry: speed, work and energy, Ohm's law and circuits, concentration, and masses in chemical reactions. Practise setting out the formula, substituting with units and rounding sensibly. Many lost marks come from unit conversion rather than from not knowing the method.

Do them under timed conditions only after you have consolidated the content, then mark them strictly against the official answer key. Record each error by cause: knowledge gap, misread question, calculation slip or unclear explanation. Revise by cause, not by topic alone, and redo the same paper later to check the fix held.

Yes. The paper assumes the full junior high curriculum, and questions often combine topics from different years within one experiment. Do not skip first- or second-year content on the assumption that it is only background; it is regularly examined directly.