For parents
What the exam is, and what you can usefully do about it
Your child sits one exam, on one morning, and it is part of how three high schools decide. That is enough pressure without a website adding to it. This page is the plain version: what the test contains, when the dates fall, and what practice does and does not change.
The two exams
TACHSRiverside Assessments, LLC
Test for Admission into Catholic High Schools
- Subtests
- Reading, Written Expression, Mathematics, Ability
- Questions on the paper
- Not published
- Time
- Not published
- Fee
- $78.00
HSPTScholastic Testing Service, Inc.
High School Placement Test
- Subtests
- Verbal Skills, Quantitative Skills, Reading, Mathematics, Language
- Questions on the paper
- 298
- Time
- 143 minutes
- Fee
- Set by the diocese
Which exam your child sits depends on the diocese. The three New York dioceses — the Archdiocese of New York, Brooklyn/Queens and Rockville Centre — use the TACHS. Catholic high schools elsewhere generally use the HSPT. The school you are applying to will tell you which.
The TACHS calendar
From the publisher’s own calendar of events for the 2026–2027 cycle. Registration is handled by the publisher, not by this site.
- Registrationcloses October 28, 2026, 11:00 p.m. Eastern
- Archdiocese of New YorkNovember 6, 2026
- Diocese of Brooklyn/QueensNovember 7, 2026
- Diocese of Rockville CentreNovember 7, 2026
When the report comes, the two numbers on it are percentile ranks; what a good TACHS score is explains why nobody publishes one.
The TACHS is taken at home under remote proctoring. Its handbook is blunt that this is not optional: testing at a school site is not supported. Check the technical requirements well before the day rather than on it.
Registration closes October 28, 2026, and there is no late registration.
We will email you now with the date, once before the deadline, and once in the week of the exam. Nothing else, and no account.
How to help, without becoming a tutor
Short and often beats long and once
Ten questions after supper, most days, is worth more than a three-hour Saturday. The sets here are ten questions for that reason.
Read the explanation, not the score
Every wrong choice here says what mistake it stands for — turned the paper instead of flipping it, took the total instead of the average. Those sentences are the useful part. The number at the end is not.
Find the weak subtest early
One mock section, marked at the end, shows you within half an hour which topics in that area are furthest behind — and a section of each shows which area is. Spend the time there rather than spreading it evenly.
Sit one paper under the real conditions
Once, near the end. Being used to answering without being told whether you were right is a skill of its own, and it is the one the day actually requires.
What we do not claim
- We cannot predict a score. Neither publisher releases the tables that turn raw answers into the number a school sees. Any site offering you a predicted result is guessing at it.
- These are not real exam questions. They were written for this site. Reprinting a publisher’s questions would be both illegal and useless, since the paper changes.
- Neither publisher endorses this. Scholastic Testing Service says publicly that it is not affiliated with test preparation products and advises parents to avoid expensive ones. We think that advice is worth reading, and we would rather you saw it here than felt misled later.
- Practice is not a substitute for school. A child who reads and does their math homework arrives better prepared than one who crams a website. What practice does is remove surprises.
Dates, deadlines and fees
The answers below are the same ones the two exam pages give, from the same registry — one copy, so the deadline cannot be right on one page and stale on another.
- When is the TACHS?
- The next TACHS is Friday, November 6, 2026. The cycle’s dates are Friday, November 6, 2026 for the Archdiocese of New York, and Saturday, November 7, 2026 for the Diocese of Brooklyn/Queens and the Diocese of Rockville Centre. Children are assigned at random to an 8:30 AM or a 10:00 AM session on their diocese’s date, and no time preference is accepted.
- When does TACHS registration close?
- Registration opened August 24, 2026 and closes October 28, 2026, at 23:00 Eastern. Riverside Assessments prints “Do not miss the deadline!” in its own calendar, and there is no late registration. Children are registered online by a parent, not by the elementary school.
- How much does the TACHS cost?
- $78, non-refundable. The fee covers the Student Handbook, the online test materials and score reporting to three high schools of your choosing.
- Is the TACHS taken at home or at a school?
- At home. The handbook is blunt that this is not optional: “This test was created to be administered as a remote, at-home test. School offerings to test students in-site is not supported by TACHS.” The sitting is supervised by remote proctoring software, so the practical preparation includes the room and the machine, not only the questions.
- When do TACHS results come out?
- The Home Report opens after 3:00 PM EST on Friday, January 22, 2027, and the handbook adds “We cannot provide your results earlier.” Instructions for reaching it are published in early January on www.tachsinfo.com. What a parent is shown is a Local and a National percentile rank, sent to the three high schools they chose — not a mark, and not a score for each subtest.
- When is the HSPT?
- Scholastic Testing Service sets no central date for the HSPT: each diocese schedules its own sitting and publishes it itself, so the date to trust is the one on the letter from the school your child is applying to.
- How much does the HSPT cost?
- The fee is set by the diocese, not by Scholastic Testing Service, so there is no single figure. One published example, from Scholastic Testing Service’s own registration portal, is $45 for the Archdiocese of Baltimore — that is one diocese and it must not be read as the price anywhere else.
- Can you use a calculator on the HSPT?
- No. Scholastic Testing Service’s administration manual states that calculators are not permitted in Mathematics, and repeats it as a note to the person running the room. Quantitative Skills is mental arithmetic and reasoning about sequences and comparisons, so nothing in the paper is written expecting one.
If you would rather not choose for them
With a free account the site keeps track instead of you. It gives your child ten questions a day chosen from what they have already answered — something they got wrong last week, then something they have never tried, then whatever has had the least attention — and it keeps bringing back the questions still unfixed until they are fixed. It is the “find the weak subtest early” advice above, done for you and repeated every day.
It predicts no score and invents no mastery percentage, for the reason given above: the tables that would make such a number mean anything are not published by anybody. See what a session looks like.
There are 3,708 questions here and nothing is behind a sign-up. Start where it is easiest: the TACHS or the HSPT.
If you teach the eighth grade rather than parent one, there are printable class sets with answer keys and a one-page handout of the dates to send home.