The TACHS exam:
a complete guide

The short version

The TACHS is the entrance exam for Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens. It is around 200 multiple-choice questions taken in about two and a half hours, sat by eighth-graders in the autumn, and the results go to the schools the family nominates when they register.

It is often described as having four parts. In the room it is six, because the Ability domain is three separate timed sections, and that structural detail matters more than it sounds.

Six sections, each with its own clock

Our practice forms mirror the real paper: 50 Reading questions, 50 Written Expression, 50 Mathematics, and then the three Ability sections of roughly 17 questions each on figure matrices, paper folding and figure classification.

Every one of those six is timed separately and closes when its time expires. You cannot return to Reading during the mathematics block. For a thirteen-year-old used to school tests where you can flip back, this is the single biggest adjustment, and it is the reason a child who knows the material can still come out of the room having left questions blank.

The Ability sections test something school never taught

This is the part of the TACHS families are least prepared for, and the part where a few hours of practice pays best.

Figure matrices give you a grid of shapes with one cell missing and ask which option belongs there. Paper folding shows a sheet folded two or three times and punched, and asks what the holes look like when it is unfolded. Figure classification gives you shapes that share a hidden property and asks which option belongs to the same group.

None of this appears in a New York eighth-grade curriculum. There is no unit on it, no homework, no teacher who covers it. A bright student who has never seen a paper-folding question can lose most of that section to sheer unfamiliarity, and a mediocre student who has done fifty of them will not. Very little else in admissions testing offers that kind of return, and it is entirely because the questions are strange rather than hard.

Written Expression is not an essay

The name misleads people every year. Nothing is written. It is 50 multiple-choice questions on spelling, capitalization, punctuation, usage and paragraph composition, and a good part of it asks you to find the error in a sentence, or to say that there is no error. That last option is correct often enough that students who have decided it is a trick lose marks on it.

You choose your schools before you see a score

Registration is where families make the decision that actually shapes the outcome, and they usually make it in a hurry. You nominate the high schools that will receive your results at the point you sign up for the test, not after you know how it went.

So the nomination is a bet placed with no information. It is worth spending real time on it: talk to the schools, look honestly at where the child stands, and treat the list as a decision rather than a form field.

The Reading section is two jobs, not one

Half of Reading is vocabulary: a word used in a short phrase, and four candidates for its meaning. The other half is passage comprehension. They reward different preparation, and the vocabulary half is the one that responds to a few weeks of deliberate work, because it is finite in a way that reading skill is not.

In the comprehension half, the questions that cost most marks are the ones asking what the author implies rather than what the author said. The correct answer is always supported by a specific line. An answer that is true about the world, and reasonable, and not in the passage, is the wrong answer, and it is the wrong answer that thirteen-year-olds find most attractive.

Percentiles, not marks

TACHS results do not come back as a mark out of 200 or a percentage. They come back as percentile ranks, placing your child against other candidates, with comparisons at both the local and national level.

A percentile is not a score, and the difference matters. The 70th percentile does not mean 70% correct. It means 70% of candidates did worse. It is possible to answer a lot of questions correctly and land at a modest percentile if the year's cohort was strong, and no school publishes a required number, because each one sets its own thresholds and does not have to tell you what they are.

What we found when we tested our own exam

Practice tests can be beaten without being read, and almost nobody checks. When the correct answer is reliably the longest of the four, a child who skips the question and picks the longest option scores well above chance, and a family reading that score has been told their child is ready when the test has not found out.

So we measure it. Across the 18 sections of our TACHS exams long enough to measure (900 questions, in sections of 20 or more), the best score any length-based strategy reaches is 37%, 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.

The three Ability sections cannot be gamed this way at all, because their options are shapes rather than sentences, so the figure above comes entirely from the Reading, Written Expression and Mathematics sections.

We are not reporting a number we were always able to report. When the measurement first ran across the whole catalogue it flagged 46 sections and 1,741 questions over the line, five of them TACHS reading sections. Those were rewritten, distractor by distractor, and the check now runs on every deploy and on every reload of a form, because a reload republishes a file and a file can be older than the fix.

How to prepare for it, in the order that pays

Start with the Ability sections, because they are the cheapest points on the paper and the only part where unfamiliarity rather than ability is doing the damage. An hour on paper folding is worth more than an hour of general mathematics revision.

Then sit a full timed form, in one sitting, with the section clocks enforced. The pacing is the second-biggest source of lost marks and it cannot be rehearsed in pieces. A child who has practiced 200 questions untimed has practiced a different test.

Leave the mathematics and reading content for last unless a diagnostic says otherwise. They are the parts school is already working on.

Our practice forms

We publish six full TACHS forms, which is more than anyone sits, and they share no questions with each other. That matters for a test where the honest signal you want is what the child can do rather than what they remember from the last attempt.

Our shorter TACHS guides cover the test in brief, the Ability sections in detail, how scoring works, how it differs from the HSPT and a preparation plan.

Where to practice

We publish six full TACHS forms with no questions shared between them, each one sat under the same six section clocks as the real paper. 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

What is the TACHS exam?

The Test for Admission into Catholic High Schools, sat by eighth-graders applying to Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens.

How many questions are on the TACHS?

Around 200 multiple-choice questions across four domains: Reading, Written Expression, Mathematics and Ability. The Ability domain is split into three separately timed sections, so a candidate sits six timed blocks in total.

How is the TACHS scored?

As percentile ranks rather than a raw mark or a pass score. You are placed against other candidates, and schools set their own thresholds. There is no published passing score.

Can you go back to a previous TACHS section?

No. Each section is timed on its own and closes when its time is up. Work left unfinished in one section cannot be picked up later.

Is the TACHS the same as the HSPT?

No. They are different tests used by different dioceses. The TACHS has an Ability domain of abstract reasoning; the HSPT does not, and the HSPT reports a Cognitive Skills Quotient the TACHS does not produce.