Guides · August 6, 2026•8 min read

Homeschool Testing: Which Test You Actually Need

Most of the confusion about homeschool testing is that the word covers at least four unrelated things. A test a state requires, a free test a publisher gives you to sell curriculum, an adaptive test built for school districts, and an evaluation that is not a test at all. They cost different amounts, they are booked in different places, and only two of them can be filed anywhere.

The four things called testing

Before anything else, work out which row you are in. The most common and most expensive mistake in this whole topic is doing the wrong one carefully: sitting a free placement test, getting a tidy score report, and discovering in August that it is not the thing your state asked for.

The three achievement tests homeschoolers actually use

When a state requires a test, the statute almost never names a brand. It names a category: a nationally standardized, or nationally normed, achievement test. That wording is doing real work. It means you choose, and it means the choice is between a small number of established tests rather than anything that calls itself a test.

• The CAT test, or California Achievement Test. The one homeschoolers reach for most, largely because it is the least demanding to arrange, and the reason a CAT test booking is the usual first search once a family learns their state wants a score. It is an older instrument, which is not a criticism: a norm referenced test does not need to be new, it needs to have a defensible norm group behind it.
• The Iowa tests (you will see them as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, ITBS, or the Iowa Assessments). Widely used in schools as well, and generally the more involved of the three to arrange because of who is permitted to administer it.
• The Stanford Achievement Test. Similar in standing to the Iowa, similar in the kind of report it produces, and similarly likely to want a qualified administrator.

Two practical points that decide most of it. First, who is allowed to administer the test, and whether that person can be you. Some tests and some providers allow a parent to administer, some require an independent proctor, and a few states settle the question themselves. Tennessee, for instance, requires the proctor not be a relative. Second, whether the test is timed. For a child who is slow and careful rather than slow and struggling, an untimed sitting is the difference between a score that describes them and a score that describes the clock.

Confirm the rules with the provider, not with us. Who may administer a given test, what it costs and whether it is offered untimed are set by the test publisher and the testing service you book through, and they change. This guide is deliberately general on those points, because a page that names a price or an administration rule is wrong within a year and confidently wrong in the meantime.

MAP is a different kind of thing

MAP is computer adaptive: the questions get harder or easier as the child answers, and the result is placed on a continuous scale rather than reported as a single annual verdict. It was built for schools that want to see growth across a year, sat two or three times, rather than for a family that needs one score once.

That makes it genuinely useful for the thing a lot of parents actually want, which is an outside opinion on whether a child is progressing. It also makes it a poor fit for the sentence in a statute, because a requirement written around an annual norm referenced achievement test was not written with an adaptive growth measure in mind. Whether your state accepts it is a question for your state, and it is not one we can answer for all fifty.

A placement test is not a compliance test

Placement tests are free, easy to find, and produced by curriculum publishers to answer one question: which level of our product should you buy. That is a genuinely useful question. If you are switching math programs and cannot tell whether to start at book four or book five, a placement test is exactly the right tool and it costs nothing.

It is not a norm referenced achievement test, it is not reported against a national sample, and no state asks for one. If you are searching for a free homeschool placement test because your state requires testing, the free thing is not the thing. This is worth being blunt about because the two searches look identical and the outcomes are not.

An evaluation is a person, not a score

A homeschool evaluation is the option people overlook, usually because they never learned it existed. Instead of sitting a test, you hand a qualified reviewer a portfolio of the year’s work and they write an opinion on whether the child made progress. Who counts as qualified is set by the state: Virginia will take a letter from someone licensed to teach in any state, or someone holding a master’s degree or higher, and New York accepts a certified teacher, a peer review panel or another agreed person.

For some children this is straightforwardly the better instrument. A child who freezes in a timed room, a child working well above or well below grade level, or a child whose year was mostly project work will all be described more accurately by a reviewer reading their actual output than by a percentile. The trade is effort: an evaluation needs a portfolio that exists, which means the work had to be kept as the year went rather than gathered in a panic the week before.

What your state actually asks for

There is no national answer, and the spread is wider than most people expect. Below is what we have verified, state by state, and each one links to the full guide for that state. If yours is not on this list, the honest answer is that we have not researched it and you should confirm with your state education agency rather than trust a summary.

• Nothing at all. No test, no evaluation, nothing to opt out of, in Texas, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Alabama, Arizona and Ohio, where the testing requirement was removed outright in 2023.
• A test every year. North Carolina requires a nationally standardized or normed achievement test annually, covering English grammar, reading, spelling and mathematics.Tennessee requires a nationally normed test you select, proctored by somebody who is not a relative, reporting in English language arts and mathematics.
• A test every three years. Georgia asks for an appropriate nationally standardized test at least every three years, taken in consultation with someone trained in administering and interpreting norm referenced tests. You keep the result rather than sending it anywhere, which is why almost nobody outside Georgia has heard of it.
• A test or an evaluation, your choice. Virginia accepts a composite score at or above the fourth stanine, which is the 23rd percentile, on any nationally normed achievement test, or an equivalent ACT, SAT or PSAT score, or an evaluation. New York varies the answer by grade band, and a standardized test becomes required in grades 9 to 12.
• An evaluation inside a portfolio. Florida builds the year around a notice, a portfolio and an evaluation, rather than around a score.
• It depends which route you took. In California the affidavit route is a private school and private schools are outside the state testing system, so there is no state testing. Go through a charter instead and state testing applies. Same state, same child, different answer.

What a percentile means, and what it does not

A norm referenced score is not a mark out of a hundred and it is not a pass. The 60th percentile means the child scored higher than 60 percent of the norm group, which is a sample of other children who sat the same test, not the children in your town and not a standard anyone set. Half of every norm group is below the 50th percentile by construction. That is what a norm is.

This matters because a handful of states attach a consequence to a low score, and most do not. Virginia’s fourth stanine is the clearest example of a floor written into law. Ohio, since its 2023 change, has no rule about scoring above a percentile at all. Knowing which kind of state you are in before you open the envelope is worth more than any preparation you could do for the test itself.

The other thing a percentile does not tell you is whether the year went well. One sitting on one morning is a thin sample of a year, and it is the least interesting record you will produce. The portfolio underneath it, the one an evaluator would actually read, is the thicker and more honest answer.

Frequently asked questions

Can I give my child the test myself?

Sometimes, and it depends on two separate things: whether the test publisher permits a parent administrator, and whether your state says anything about who may proctor. Tennessee requires a non-relative. Georgia requires consultation with someone trained in norm referenced testing. Plenty of states say nothing at all, at which point the publisher’s rule is the only rule. Check both, in that order.

What happens if my child scores badly?

In most states, nothing, because most states either require no test or require the test without attaching a consequence to the result. A small number set a floor and a remediation process behind it. This is entirely a question about your own state, and it is the first thing to look up, because it changes whether the test is an administrative errand or a genuine assessment.

Do I have to send the score to anyone?

Often not. Georgia is the clearest case: you administer the test, you keep the result, and nobody collects it. A requirement to take a test and a requirement to submit one are two different obligations, and a good deal of unnecessary worry comes from assuming the first implies the second.

Is a placement test enough for my state?

No. A placement test is a publisher’s tool for selling you the right level of a curriculum, and it is not norm referenced. If your state requires testing, it requires a nationally standardized or nationally normed achievement test, which a placement test is not.

What Bowerstead does not do here. It does not administer, score or store a standardized test result. There is no field for a percentile anywhere in it, and adding one would suggest we can tell you what your state does with the number. What it holds is the thing underneath the score: the day recorded as it happened, the subject and the work attached, instruction days counted and a transcript that assembles from the same entries. In an evaluation state that portfolio is the actual deliverable, and in a testing state it is what makes one thin morning of results look like the year it came from.

An online homeschool planner turns that into a few seconds a day rather than a reconstruction in June. $9 a month or $79 a year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get started. Our guide to homeschool record keeping covers what to keep and for how long, and the transcript guide covers where test scores go once you have them.