What this exam actually asks of you
The HSPT is 298 questions across five sections in about two and a half hours. It is the longest paper we publish, and the length is the point: Language sits at the end, it is 60 questions of punctuation and usage, and it is met by a candidate who has already been working for two hours.
The mistake that ruins the result
Practicing the sections separately on different days. Each one feels manageable alone, which is exactly why the real paper surprises people. Nobody has ever failed the HSPT at question 30.
How to sit it
All five sections, one sitting, in the published order. If two and a half hours is genuinely impossible, sit the last three together rather than the first three, because the end is the half you have not tested.
What to do the day after
Compare your accuracy in Language against your accuracy in Verbal Skills. If Language is much worse, the problem is stamina rather than punctuation, and more grammar drills will not fix it.
What a practice test owes you
The HSPT decides admission, then course placement, then scholarships, so a result that merely gets you in still costs something. That makes the reasons behind the errors worth more here than the score.
Our HSPT bank holds 1,192 questions and 3,544 wrong answers, and every one of those wrong answers carries its own sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking. Not one is left bare, and a build of our site fails if that stops being true. Across 298 questions that is a lot of reading, which is why we would rather you worked through twenty explanations properly than skimmed all of them.
We also measure whether the paper can be beaten without being read. On our HSPT exams the best any length-based strategy scores is 39%, against the 25% that pure guessing gives. A practice test where picking the longest option beats guessing is measuring the person who wrote it, not your child.
The Cognitive Skills Quotient is built from Verbal Skills and Quantitative Skills, the two sections at the front that a fresh candidate rushes. Watch those two on a practice sitting even though they feel like the easy part.
Where to sit one
Our HSPT forms run the full 298 questions across all five sections, because a shortened practice paper cannot rehearse the thing that goes wrong at the end of a long test. A free sample is on the samples page, and it needs no account.
More on this exam: the full HSPT guide, the TACHS compared with the HSPT.
Common questions
How long should a HSPT practice test take?
About two and a half hours for all 298 questions across five sections.
Should a HSPT practice test be timed?
Yes. Each section is timed on its own, and the last one arrives after two hours of work.
Is the score the useful part of a HSPT practice test?
No, the reasons are. Every one of the 3,544 wrong answers in our HSPT bank carries a sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking, and for HSPT that is what turns a list of misses into a plan.
How often should we sit a HSPT practice test?
Twice, with a month between. The second sitting is where you find out whether the stamina improved.
Practice the real thing
Our HSPT exams are full length and written from scratch — every wrong answer carries its own explanation, so a child learns what they got wrong and why. Ten questions are free, with no account and no card. After that it is five credits an exam.