What is the HSPT,
and which schools use it?

The short answer

The HSPT — High School Placement Test — is an admissions exam sat by grade 8 students, typically from late November into early December. In New York it is used by a number of independent Catholic schools, including Regis, Xavier, Fordham Prep and Loyola, while most diocesan schools use the TACHS instead.

The five subtests

Look at that first row again

Sixteen seconds a question. That is the Verbal Skills subtest, and it is the single feature that defines the HSPT experience. It is not a reading test; there is no time to read in any ordinary sense. It is a recognition test, and students who have not rehearsed the pace simply do not finish.

We wrote about this separately in why the HSPT verbal section defeats good students, because it catches out exactly the careful, thorough children who do well everywhere else.

The scholarship point

At several New York schools the HSPT does more than decide admission — it decides merit scholarships. That changes the calculation for families considerably, and it is worth asking each school on your list directly how they use the score.

No abstract reasoning

Unlike the TACHS, the HSPT has no figure matrices or paper folding. Everything on it is verbal, quantitative or mathematical. A student sitting both exams needs to prepare the TACHS ability sections separately, because nothing on the HSPT rehearses them.

Preparing

Our HSPT practice exams run all five subtests at the real question counts and the real clock — including sixteen minutes for sixty verbal questions, which is the part a student has to feel rather than read about. ten free questions will show you the question style.