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.
- Registration closesOctober 28, 2026, 11:00 p.m. EST
- Archdiocese of New YorkNovember 6, 2026
- Diocese of Brooklyn/QueensNovember 7, 2026
- Diocese of Rockville CentreNovember 7, 2026
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.
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
A mock section will show you within half an hour which of the four or five areas is furthest behind. 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 maths homework arrives better prepared than one who crams a website. What practice does is remove surprises.
There are 3,708 questions here and nothing is behind a sign-up. Start where it is easiest: the TACHS or the HSPT.