The SHSAT:
a complete guide

The short version

The SHSAT is the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. It is 114 multiple-choice and grid-in questions, 57 in English Language Arts and 57 in mathematics, sat in a single 180-minute session with no break between the halves. It is the only thing that decides admission to New York City's specialized high schools. Not grades, not attendance, not an interview, not your state test results. One morning, one paper.

That last point is the one families most often refuse to believe, and it is worth being blunt about, because it changes how you should spend the year before the test. Nothing you did in seventh grade helps. Nothing your teacher writes helps. The score is the application.

Twenty of the questions do not count

Here is the fact that surprises nearly everyone. Of the 114 questions, only 94 are scored. Ten questions in each section are field-test items: questions being trialed for use on a future exam, mixed in with the real ones and marked in no way at all. You cannot spot them, and neither can your tutor.

Two things follow from that, and both are practical. The first is that a question that feels bizarre, or unlike anything in your preparation, has a reasonable chance of being one that will never affect your score. It is not worth four minutes and a spiral. The second is arithmetic: your raw score is out of 94, not 114, so every scoring chart you find online that divides by the wrong number is wrong by a fifth.

The two halves are not equal in difficulty

English Language Arts opens with revising and editing: roughly nine to eleven questions on grammar, sentence structure and paragraph logic, usually built around a short student essay. The rest of the section is reading comprehension across informational and literary passages.

Mathematics is 52 multiple-choice questions and five grid-in questions, where you produce the answer yourself and write it into a grid rather than choosing from four options. Those five are the questions where no elimination strategy exists, and they are worth exactly the same as every other question. Students who have practiced only multiple choice meet them cold.

Because there is no per-section clock, the paper is really a budgeting exercise. Most students should not spend 90 minutes on each half. The reading passages are long, and the mathematics rewards students who can move quickly through the routine items and bank time for the rest.

What the score actually is

Your raw score out of 94 is converted to a scaled score, and the two sections are combined into one composite. The conversion is not a percentage and it is not fixed year to year: it is an equating process that makes a score on this year's paper mean the same as the same score on last year's, which is why a harder paper produces a more generous conversion.

Then every candidate in the city is ranked by that composite, and seats are filled from the top down, in the order you listed the schools. That is the whole mechanism, and it has a consequence people miss: the cutoff is not a standard, it is a byproduct. Nobody at the Department of Education decides that Stuyvesant requires a particular number. The number is whatever the last student admitted happened to score. It moves every year with the size and strength of the applicant pool.

Ranking schools: honesty beats strategy

You list the specialized high schools in order of preference, up to eight of them. The matching runs down your list and places you at the highest-ranked school where your score reaches the cutoff.

This is worth understanding because the instinct to play games with the order is strong and it is wrong. Putting a school you want less in first position cannot improve your chances at it, and it can cost you the school you actually wanted. Ranking a reach school first cannot hurt you either. The honest order is the optimal order, every time.

Grade 8 and grade 9 are not the same opportunity

The SHSAT is sat by eighth-graders for entry to grade 9, and by ninth-graders for entry to grade 10. Both are real routes, but they are not equivalent: the grade 9 intake exists to fill seats that opened up, so there are far fewer of them and the competition is correspondingly sharper. If a student is on the fence about sitting in eighth grade, "there is always next year" is a much weaker fallback than it sounds.

How our practice exams are built

Our four SHSAT practice exams are adaptive, which is unusual for this test and is a deliberate choice. The bank holds 886 questions sorted into three difficulty tiers, and the exam picks the next question based on how you have answered so far, so a strong student meets hard questions early instead of grinding through thirty easy ones to reach them.

It also carries the question types the paper-and-pencil practice books mostly skip. Across the bank there are 133 grid-in mathematics items, 81 multi-select questions, 36 hotspot items where you click the evidence in a passage, 37 inline-choice items and 22 ordering questions. A student who has only ever practiced four-option multiple choice has not practiced this exam.

What we found when we tested our own exam

Here is something no prep company publishes about its own bank. A practice test can be beaten without being read. If the correct answer is reliably the longest one on offer, a student who never reads the question scores far above chance, and on a test where one sitting decides admission that inflated number is the most expensive lie in the whole process.

So we measure it. Across the 8 sections of our SHSAT exams long enough to measure (614 questions, in sections of 20 or more), the best score any length-based strategy reaches is 29%, against the 25% that guessing alone should give. Four strategies are scored: pick the longest option, pick the shortest, cross off the longest and guess, cross off the shortest and guess.

On the SHSAT bank that number is the lowest of any family we sell, which is what you would hope for on the test with the most riding on a single sitting.

That figure comes out of the live question bank, produced by the same script that runs in our deploy pipeline and fails the build if any section passes 40%. We did not always pass it. The first run across everything we sell flagged 46 sections and 1,741 questions, and one section could be beaten 91% of the time by picking the longest answer. Rewriting them took weeks, and we are publishing both numbers because a company that has never measured this cannot give you either.

Common mistakes we see

Treating the reading passages as a comprehension exercise. They are a retrieval exercise. Every correct answer can be pointed at in the text, and students who answer from a general impression of the passage lose marks they had the ability to keep.

Leaving mathematics until last. The section is at the back of the booklet, and students who work strictly in order arrive at it tired with fifty minutes left. Nothing in the rules says you must start at question one.

Preparing from a practice test nobody has measured. See the section above. If a practice test can be beaten by a student who does not read it, the score it gives you is not information.

A year-out plan that is not a fantasy

Sit one full timed exam early, before any preparation, and treat the result as a diagnosis rather than a verdict. Work on whichever section is weaker, because the composite treats them equally and improvements are cheaper where you are worse. Sit a second full exam about halfway through, under real conditions, in one sitting, with the clock running. Most of the value of a practice exam is in the three hours of endurance, and that value disappears entirely if you take it in twenty-minute pieces over a week.

Read our shorter guides on how the SHSAT is scored, pacing and timing, grade 8 against grade 9 and what changed for 2026.

Where to practice

Our four SHSAT practice exams are adaptive and drawn from a bank of 886 questions in three difficulty tiers, so the exam finds your level instead of making you prove it thirty questions at a time. Every wrong answer carries its own explanation saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking, which is the part that turns a score into something you can act on. There is a free sample on the samples page if you want to see the format before paying for anything.

Common questions

How many questions are on the SHSAT?

114 in total, 57 in English Language Arts and 57 in mathematics. Only 94 of them count toward your score. The other 20 are field-test questions being trialed for future years, and they are not marked or identified.

Is there a penalty for a wrong answer on the SHSAT?

No. Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so a blank and a wrong answer score identically. Leaving a question empty simply throws away a one-in-four chance.

How long is the SHSAT?

180 minutes for the whole paper. There is no separate time limit for each section, so you decide how to divide three hours between the two halves.

Can you use a calculator on the SHSAT?

No. The mathematics section, including the grid-in questions, is done without one.

What score do you need to get into Stuyvesant?

There is no fixed number. Cutoffs are set after the test by ranking every candidate and filling the seats, so the score that gets in changes each year with the applicant pool. A cutoff published for last year is a guide, not a target.