Week 0: one full exam, timed
All five subtests, real clocks, one sitting. The purpose is the breakdown, not the score. Specifically: which subtests ran out of time, and which lost marks with time to spare. Those two failures need completely different remedies and a total cannot tell them apart.
Weeks 1–8: vocabulary, every single day
Fifteen minutes, daily, for the whole eight weeks. Not a block, not a weekend push — daily.
This is the highest-return activity available for the HSPT, because Verbal Skills allows sixteen seconds a question. At that pace there is no working out. A word is known or it is not. Vocabulary is the only thing that converts directly into marks there, and it is the only part of the exam that rewards slow accumulation.
Weeks 1–3: mathematics content
Work from the diagnostic, weakest topics first. Mathematics gives about forty-two seconds a question — the most generous subtest — so it is the one place careful work is genuinely rewarded, and the one worth investing content time in.
Weeks 3–5: language and quantitative
Language — punctuation, capitalization, usage — is a rulebook, so it moves quickly. Quantitative Skills is number series and comparisons, which look strange at first and become routine after a few dozen. Both reward familiarity more than study.
Weeks 5–8: full-length exams, weekly
One complete timed exam a week. Two hundred and ninety-eight questions is genuinely tiring, and a student who has never done the whole thing will fade through the later subtests.
Set the real clock every time. A practice exam without the clock rehearses a test that does not exist.
The final week
Vocabulary, wrong answers from earlier sittings, and sleep. No new material. Nothing learned in the last week reaches the exam; being rested does.
What this needs
Around three to four hours a week, and four full-length exams. Our HSPT exams are sold individually. If your child is also sitting the SHSAT, read sitting both in the same fall before planning the last month.
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.