One-on-one HSPT prep with me, Nico, at your home or online. The HSPT decides Catholic high school admission for your 8th grader — and often placement and scholarships — in a single sitting, which amounts to 298 questions in about two and a half hours. Schools discourage retakes, so we prepare like there's one shot. Because there is.
It's the placement test used by Catholic high schools — in LA that includes schools like Loyola — and it crams five sections into one rapid-fire morning. Scores come back as percentiles, and they can carry scholarship and honors-placement weight, not just admission.
Three things define it: speed (about half a minute per question, less on Verbal), no guessing penalty (a blank is the only wrong strategy), and one sitting (retakes are discouraged). Preparation is how you take the pressure out of all three.
The Verbal section runs 60 questions in 16 minutes. We train at real speed weekly until that pace feels normal instead of frantic.
No penalty means every unanswered question is a donated point. Commit-and-move-on is a discipline, and we drill it.
A strong composite score can mean honors placement and tuition assistance. One prepared morning in eighth grade can quietly be worth thousands.
Same backbone as all my test prep — diagnostic, target, weekly timed practice, regular practice tests — compressed to fit an eighth-grader's fall schedule.
A full timed HSPT before anything else, so we know the real starting percentile and exactly which of the five sections needs the most work.
Content gaps close quickly at this level; pace is the differentiator. Weekly timed sections build the tempo required on test day.
By test day your student has done the full morning several times — same order, same clock. The real one is just the familiar one that counts.
In eighth grade, usually in winter — most Catholic high schools administer it on campus as part of the application.
That fixed date is why we work backward from it: a 12–20 week runway starting in late summer or early fall of eighth grade to make the process easy.
Plan on one sitting. Schools generally discourage retakes, and policies on which score counts vary — so the first morning is the one that matters.
That's not meant to add pressure; it's why preparation is worth it. Walking in trained beats walking in hopeful.
More than admission — many Catholic high schools also use HSPT results for course placement and scholarship decisions.
A strong composite percentile can mean honors placement and real tuition money, which makes this one of the highest-leverage mornings of eighth grade.
Yes — always. Unlike the SSAT, the HSPT has no guessing penalty, so no question should ever be left blank.
The skill we train instead is speed: at roughly half a minute per question, knowing when to commit and move on is worth more than knowing one extra vocabulary word or finishing a harder math question.