My daughter has her HSPT coming up in early November for Bishop Noll and she's starting prep now with about 8 weeks to go. She's a solid student, gets mostly A's and B's, but hasn't done any standardized test prep before. I'm trying to figure out if 8 weeks is realistic or if we needed to start sooner.
From what I've read, the test is 5 sections: verbal skills, quantitative skills, reading, math, and language. The quantitative skills section seems to be the one that catches kids off guard because it's not standard school math — it's sequences, analogies, and logic patterns. She's been working through an HSPT Practice Test every Saturday morning and reviewing errors Sunday afternoon, which seems to be helping her identify weak spots.
After two weekends her practice scores are around 68th percentile overall but only 55th on quantitative. Her verbal is strong at 79th. The school she's applying to typically accepts students scoring at or above the 75th percentile, so we need to close that gap in quantitative specifically over the next six weeks.
Any advice from parents who've been through this? Wondering if a tutor for the quantitative section is worth it or if focused self-study can get her there in time.
One thing that helped us was treating the language section as easy points rather than skipping it. Kids often neglect it because it's grammar and punctuation, but it's very coachable and you can pick up 5–8 percentile points with focused work in just two weeks.
We hired a tutor for 4 sessions specifically on quantitative and it made a big difference. The tutor knew which question types come up most often and cut through a lot of wasted study time. Cost us about $200 total but my daughter gained roughly 12 percentile points in that section.
8 weeks is plenty if she's disciplined. My son started at 6 weeks and went from 61st to 82nd percentile overall. The quantitative section responds really well to pattern drilling — there are really only about 8 sequence types they test and once you've seen them all they're recognizable.
Also make sure she's timing herself. The HSPT is 2 hours 28 minutes and pacing matters — especially in verbal where some kids spend too long on analogies and run out of time. Saturday full-length timed tests are the right call.