For parents of 7th and 8th graders applying to private and Catholic high schools
The call usually comes in the second week of November.
A parent has the score report back from their son's high school entrance exam. He is a good student — A's and B's, well liked, plays a sport. The score came back near the middle of the pack, and nothing about that number matches the kid they know.
Then comes the question I get every year: when can he take it again?
For a lot of these families, the answer is that he can't. And for some of them there's a worse problem underneath — he prepared for the wrong test.
We read the admissions pages of 154 schools. You cannot guess the exam.
Every year I watch families assume that Catholic high school means the HSPT and independent school means the ISEE. So we went and checked. We pulled the entrance-exam requirements for 154 of the most sought-after private and Catholic high schools in California, Dallas–Fort Worth and the New York metro, straight from each school's own admissions page.
The rule isn't the denomination. It's the diocese, and sometimes the religious order.
California. The assumption mostly holds — 24 of the 30 Catholic high schools we checked use the HSPT. But Cathedral Catholic in San Diego dropped it and says so plainly: "Cathedral Catholic High School has decided to move away from the High School Placement Test (HSPT)." It runs its own exam now. Chaminade in West Hills isn't requiring an entrance exam at all next year. Sacred Heart Prep in Atherton states flatly that "standardized testing is not required."
Dallas–Fort Worth. The HSPT essentially doesn't exist. Not one of the 33 DFW schools we checked uses it. The Catholic schools there run on the ISEE — Jesuit Dallas ("All freshmen applicants are required to take the ISEE test and should spend time preparing"), Ursuline, Bishop Lynch, Bishop Dunne, John Paul II. Cistercian is blunter: "Cistercian utilizes its own entrance exam and not the ISEE."
New York. A fourth exam most of the country has never heard of. The diocesan schools — Archbishop Molloy, St. Francis Prep, Bishop Loughlin, Chaminade, Kellenberg, Stepinac — use the TACHS, the Test for Admission into Catholic High Schools. But the Jesuit schools in the same city use the HSPT instead: Regis, Xavier, Fordham Prep, Loyola. Same church, same five boroughs, different test.
And Regis tells families something they'd never guess: "No, we have a separate exam. Please do not put Regis down as one of your three choices." List Regis on the TACHS form and you've burned one of three slots for nothing.
If you're in North Jersey, do not buy a COOP book
This is the one I'd most like every Bergen County parent to read.
For decades the North Jersey Catholic schools used the COOP — the Cooperative Admissions Examination Program. Walk into a bookstore today and you'll find prep guides from Kaplan and Princeton Review with COOP / HSPT / TACHS on the cover, teaching all three as separate tests.
Here is what the COOP program's own website now says:
"The Cooperative Admissions Examination Program (COOP) will be using the High School Placement Test (HSPT®) for the 2026 administration."
The program kept its name. The test changed.
So a family in the Archdiocese of Newark or the Diocese of Paterson who buys a book labeled COOP, and works through the COOP format, is preparing for something their child will not sit. The schools confirm it in their own words — Paramus Catholic: "all incoming ninth-grade applicants must submit their HSPT results." Bergen Catholic, Don Bosco Prep, Immaculate Heart Academy: HSPT, and no COOP anywhere on their sites.
If you take one thing from this article: check the exam name on your school's own admissions page this week. Not the book cover. Not what the older sibling took three years ago. The school's page.
Now the rule that makes it urgent
Once you know which exam your schools use, that exam's rules decide how much runway your family actually has.
The HSPT is usually one administration. Given on a single Saturday set by the school or the diocese. Many dioceses state it may not be repeated, and where a school does allow a second sitting, the common practice is to count the lower score or discard both. There is no superscore. Xavier in Manhattan puts it in four words: "Your son can only take the HSPT once."
It compounds, too. Archbishop Mitty notes that applicants to more than one Catholic high school in the Diocese of San Jose "may take the exam only once" — one sitting, scores distributed to every diocesan school on the list. That Saturday morning isn't carrying one application. It's carrying all of them.
TACHS is one date each fall. The schools we checked list a single sitting — November 6th for the Archdiocese of New York, November 7th for Brooklyn, Queens and Rockville Centre. One morning, up to three schools.
The ISEE gives you three, and every school sees all three. One sitting per testing season — Fall runs August through November, Winter December through March, Spring/Summer April through July. But every report goes to every school on your list. A weak first attempt doesn't disappear; it becomes context. Some schools narrow it further: Harvard-Westlake accepts only one ISEE sitting and says outright that it "does not recommend taking the ISEE more than once."
The SSAT is the forgiving one. Six national dates between October and March, plus flex and at-home options.
And some schools cap you regardless. Academy of the Holy Angels in Demarest accepts the HSPT or the SSAT, then adds: "AHA only accepts one score report per applicant." You choose up front and you commit. You cannot sit both and send the better one.
Read that section again, because it contains the actual advice here. The preparation your family needs isn't set by how confident your child is. It's set by which exam your schools happen to use, and how many attempts that exam allows.
Why the score surprises people
Parents assume a disappointing score means their child doesn't know the material. Usually it means something else.
Look at how the HSPT is built. Five sections, 298 multiple-choice questions, 141 minutes of actual testing:
Verbal skills — 60 questions in 16 minutes
Quantitative skills — 52 questions in 30 minutes
Reading — 62 questions in 25 minutes
Mathematics — 64 questions in 45 minutes
Language skills — 60 questions in 25 minutes
Do the division on the verbal section. Sixty questions in sixteen minutes is sixteen seconds a question. Reading gives twenty-four seconds a question, and that includes reading the passages.
None of the content is above grade level. It's middle school arithmetic, middle school grammar, analogies and synonyms and reading passages. Your child has seen all of it.
What your child has almost certainly never seen is 298 questions arriving at that speed, in that order, on a morning that counts.
So the score isn't measuring what they know. It's measuring what they can retrieve under a clock, in a format they've never encountered, on the one day it matters.
That's the most coachable thing in all of test preparation.
What the score buys, beyond a yes
Families think of the entrance exam as a gate. It is a gate. But at most schools it's also two other things, and that's where the real money sits.
Placement. Many schools use entrance exam results to set a student's math and English track in ninth grade. The kid who lands in honors geometry as a freshman is on a different four-year path than the kid who lands in standard algebra — different courses, different AP ceiling by senior year, a different transcript in front of a college admissions officer. One Saturday morning in eighth grade quietly narrows or widens what's available in twelfth.
Money. Merit scholarships at these schools are frequently awarded straight off entrance exam performance. Not need-based aid, which is a separate application — merit. Cathedral Catholic states it about as clearly as a school can: students who take its placement test on campus receive priority consideration for enrollment, scholarships and tuition assistance. Regis runs its exam explicitly as a scholarship exam.
Run that against four years of tuition before you decide preparation isn't worth it.
What preparation actually does, and what it doesn't
I'll be straight with you, because this industry usually isn't.
Preparing for one of these exams does not make your child smarter. It doesn't add points to some fixed measure of ability. Anyone who promises you a specific score increase on an entrance exam is selling you something they cannot deliver, and you should walk.
Here's what preparation does do.
It removes the surprises. Your child walks in having already seen the format, already knowing the verbal section moves at sixteen seconds a question, already having decided in advance what to do when they hit one they can't solve. They've practiced the specific act of skipping and moving on — a skill almost no thirteen-year-old has, because nothing in middle school has ever asked them for it.
It finds the gaps that grades hide. A kid can carry an A in eighth grade math and still have a soft spot in fractions or ratios that a timed test finds in about four seconds. Classroom grades reward homework completion and participation. These tests don't.
It converts anxiety into rehearsal. Most of what gets called test anxiety in a thirteen-year-old is unfamiliarity wearing a scarier name. They're nervous because they genuinely do not know what is about to happen to them. Fix that and a large part of the nerves goes with it.
None of that is mystical. It's rehearsal, done early enough to matter.
The timeline, plainly
Spring of 7th grade. Open the admissions page of every school on your list and find the exam by name. Not the diocese's page, not a book cover — the school's own page. Fifty of our 154 schools accept more than one exam, nineteen run their own, twenty-two require none at all, and several changed their policy for this cycle. If it isn't stated plainly, call the admissions office and ask.
Summer before 8th grade. Take a full-length, timed diagnostic of the right exam. Not a worksheet — the whole thing, clock running. You want the real number while there's still time to do something about it.
Fall of 8th grade. Work the gaps the diagnostic found and drill pacing. Registration deadlines land here, and earlier than parents expect — TACHS registration for this cycle closed in late October.
Test day. For most of these exams, this is the day. Treat it that way.
If your child is already an eighth grader and you're reading this now, you haven't missed the window. You have a compressed one. Start with the diagnostic.
If we were sitting across the table
I'd ask you one question before anything else: which exam do the schools on your list actually use?
If you don't know yet, that's the whole assignment this week. Everything follows from it — how many attempts you get, how much runway you have, whether one weak morning is recoverable or permanent.
And if the answer is the HSPT or the TACHS, I'd tell you what I tell every family who calls in November. The test is coachable. The content is grade level. Your kid is capable of it.
But you get one Saturday.
Plan for the one Saturday.
Test Prep Gurus has prepared students for the HSPT, ISEE, SSAT and TACHS for over twenty years, in person and online. We start with a full-length timed diagnostic, so you see the real number and the real gaps before you commit to anything. Call us or send us a note and we'll get one on the calendar.
Requirements above were read from each school's own admissions pages in August 2026 and reflect the 2026–27 and 2027–28 admissions cycles. Three of the 154 schools could not be confirmed from their own site and are excluded from every figure here. Policies, dates and scholarship criteria change every year — confirm with each school's admissions office before building a plan around any of it. Sources: HSPT format, Scholastic Testing Service via the Archdiocese of Washington · ISEE testing seasons · SSAT dates · NJ COOP/HSPT program, and High School Reach.