HSPT prep: what to practice and a 2026 timeline

What the test publisher says about prep

The HSPT is published by Scholastic Testing Service (STS) of Bensenville, Illinois, and has been used since 1955. STS is not affiliated with any HSPT prep book or course and does not endorse them. On its page for parents, STS tells families to avoid expensive prep materials and says a well-rounded education is the best preparation.

That does not mean practice is pointless. It means the useful kind of practice is ordinary school-subject practice, done under a clock, plus knowing how the test works before test day.

Know the pace

There are five multiple-choice subtests, 298 questions in total. STS does not publish section times on its public pages, but the times below are the ones commonly used. The last column is simple arithmetic: section minutes divided by questions.

Subtest	Questions	Minutes	About per question
Verbal Skills	60	16	16 seconds
Quantitative Skills	52	30	35 seconds
Reading	62	25	24 seconds
Mathematics	64	45	42 seconds
Language	60	25	25 seconds

That is roughly 2 hours 20 minutes of testing. Verbal Skills is the fastest section by a wide margin, so practising it untimed teaches the wrong habit. A school may also add an optional Science test (40 items, 25 minutes) or a Catholic Religion test (20 minutes); neither counts toward the composite score; check whether your school adds either test before planning practice.

More detail on the format is on our page What’s on the HSPT?, and on difficulty in Is the HSPT hard?.

Two rules to drill until they’re automatic

No calculator. Calculators are not allowed. If your child does arithmetic on a phone or a calculator at home, practice math by hand instead.

Answer every question. The HSPT scores only correct answers, with no penalty for wrong ones. There is never a reason to leave a bubble blank. Practising this is mostly practising the clock: if a question is going nowhere, mark a choice and move on. Our page on which admissions tests penalize wrong answers compares this with the other tests.

STS also recommends that each student take the HSPT only once; a school may allow a retest in special circumstances, case by case. In the New Jersey COOP program, the COOP HSPT may be taken only once. Plan the one sitting accordingly.

What you cannot buy

Families looking for an official practice test hit three dead ends:

• The STS HSPT Preview Sample is for high school admissions staff only and is mailed only to a school address.
• The Pre-HSPT, a 7th-grade edition used as practice, is available only to high schools through STS’s lease-and-score program. Your child can take it only if a high school offers it.
• The 2026–27 NJ COOP/HSPT Student Handbook contains no sample questions. It points families to ststesting.com for information about what is on the test.

Our page Is there an HSPT practice test PDF? covers this in full.

In the meantime, general skill practice on this site is one place to work under a clock. These are ordinary skill drills, not HSPT questions: verbal analogies, synonyms, fractions, percents, ratios and proportions, equations and inequalities, exponents and roots, probability and math word problems.

A dated plan for the 2026 NJ sitting

Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of Newark (Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Union, and Rockland County, NY) and the Diocese of Paterson (Morris, Passaic, Sussex) use the HSPT through the NJ COOP program. For fall 2027 entry, that is the main area sitting.

Date	What to do
September 1, 2026	Registration opens at njcoopexam.org. Fee is $70, non-refundable.
By October 9, 2026	Registration deadline for students at participating Catholic schools.
By October 20, 2026	Extended-time forms must be postmarked.
By October 23, 2026	Registration closes.
Before test day	Choose up to three participating high schools to receive scores.
Friday, November 6, 2026	Test day, 8:00–11:45 a.m. Testing starts at 8:30, so arrive by 8:00.
Saturday, November 14, 2026	Make-up date, $10 cash.
By December 9, 2026	Ninth-grade applicant records due.
January 11, 2027	STS emails score reports to families.
January 15, 2027	High schools send admission decisions.

Two details worth knowing before November 6. Scores go to up to three participating high schools, which students list on test day, in no particular order — so that choice is a conversation to have at home in October, not in the gym at 8:25 a.m. And latecomers must use the make-up date and pay an extra $10. An unregistered student can walk in for $95 on November 6, or $105 at the November 14 make-up, paid by cash, bank check or money order, but a walk-in seat is not assured, some sites close when full, and extended time is not available for walk-ins.

If your school is not in the NJ program

Schools elsewhere set their own HSPT dates, often in fall or winter, and STS has no national test dates or code system. Schools and dioceses, not STS, run the test and handle scores; STS does not mail results to homes.

STS also sets no passing score. Each school weighs HSPT scores in its own way. So the one prep step that applies everywhere is to check the admissions page of each school on your list for its test date, its registration deadline, and whether it adds an optional subtest. See HSPT scores explained for how to read the report when it arrives, and TACHS vs HSPT if you are not yet sure which test your child needs.