Resources › Placement Tests
Find out where your student actually is before you buy a year of the wrong thing. All of these are free, and none of them is ours.
Free
Free adaptive maths and reading practice that shows you where a student actually is.
The easiest place to start, because there is nothing to print and nothing to mark. It adapts as it goes, so a student who is two years behind in one strand and on level in another shows up as exactly that instead of as a single misleading grade. Use the course recommendation rather than assuming the year on the birth certificate.
Works on a phone. Create the student account before you sit down together, not during.
Free
Free written placement tests for grades 6 to 12, covering grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing.
The best free option for a formal ELA result, and it tests the two things that decide whether a student can re-enter school on level: comprehension and writing. Test those honestly. A flattering result now is paid for later, at the point where it is too late to fix quietly.
Written and marked against a key, so it takes a sitting rather than ten minutes.
Free
Math placement, from arithmetic up through the high school sequence.
Math is the subject where placing wrong hurts most, because every topic sits on the one before it. A student put a year too high spends that year quietly failing to follow, and the gap that caused it never gets filled. This is the cheapest way to find the real floor.
Math only. Pair it with one of the ELA tests above.
Free
Reading and maths placement tests from Alpha Omega Publications.
A useful second opinion. Placement tests disagree with each other more than anyone admits, and two results that broadly agree are worth far more than one taken as gospel. Run this after Khan and see whether the answers line up.
Tied to their own curriculum sequence, so read the level as a range rather than a verdict.
Free
Placement across several subjects, with a strong reading component.
Worth it for the reading placement in particular, which is built around real books rather than isolated passages. That matters if the goal is a student who reads whole books, not one who is good at answering questions about paragraphs.
Also tied to a curriculum. Treat the recommendation as a starting point.