Questions schools ask

No. Scoring is deterministic: the same answers always earn the same score, for every student. The test describes what your child showed; it does not decide about your child. There is no AI in the scored path, and in this version no AI service receives any student answer.

The report names the skills the student demonstrated and the ones they did not, and hands that description to your school. The admission decision is yours, and the report says so on its face: “This is a placement recommendation, not an admission decision.”

Applicants entering grades 3–8, in math and language arts. Younger children need questions read aloud and drawn as pictures, not printed in sentences, and we would rather wait than test a six-year-old’s reading when we meant to test their math. Grades 1–2 will come later as a separate track built for them.

At onboarding you tell us which program and level you teach in each subject and grade, and the report speaks in your ladder. The mapping comes from each publisher’s publicly published scope and sequence; we hold no publisher content and never reproduce their items.

Packs exist for Abeka, BJU Press, Saxon and Purposeful Design. None has yet been checked in a pilot at a school that teaches it; the Abeka pack goes first. Until yours has, we ask your teachers to review the mapping with us before you rely on it. Placement Genius is not affiliated with or endorsed by any publisher.

No, and most schools with their own tutors should not. The Bridge Plan is free at every tier: the gap skills in teaching order, the named error patterns where the evidence supports one, suggested materials, rough hour estimates, weekly milestones, and a retest on those skills. Hand it to your resource teacher, a parent, or an outside tutor. Testing never requires buying intervention.

A one-page family summary, separate from the internal admissions report, in plain English: where the child shines, one honest note about what your school will work on, the first-month plan, and two or three things to do at home. Where a public-school transfer simply has not reached a skill your school teaches earlier, the summary says exactly that, so a difference in sequence is not mistaken for a deficit. No raw scores and no item-level detail. You decide whether and when to share it.

Those instruments rank a student against a national norm group. That is worth knowing, but it does not tell a teacher which book to hand the child on Monday. Placement Genius answers that question first: measured against the curriculum your school teaches, what has this student mastered, and what specifically is missing?

A national comparison is not available yet. Every report says so in its national cell, and nothing else on the report stands in for one. Building one honestly needs answers combined across many schools, and at launch we combine no school’s data with any other’s. If we offer it later, it will be only with a school’s written agreement, with names removed and a notice to parents, and it will be labelled with its basis and sample size. It will not be ready this admissions season. Until then the two work together: keep the normed test if you give one, and use Placement Genius to know where to start.

The test opens below the applying grade and steps down as needed. If a student is below the lowest level the instrument covers, the report says “below floor” honestly rather than inventing a placement. For a grade-3 student, a below-floor result recommends a one-to-one assessment, with no flag: for a child that young it says the test was too hard to measure with, not that something is wrong, and placement does not wait for it.

For older students, certain patterns, such as a foundational break far below the level the student shows elsewhere or a subject the student could not do at all, raise a plain flag, “warrants a conversation about a professional evaluation,” instead of a plan. That flag is never softened into an upsell. This is not a diagnosis of any learning disability, and the report says so.

If a student answered much of a subject faster than the questions could be read, the report marks that subject “not measured,” prints no level and no recommendation for it, and offers a free retest. A cut-short session is flagged the same way. Retests use different questions wherever the bank allows.

“I haven’t learned this yet” is a first-class answer button, and we tell students to use it. It separates never-taught from misunderstood. A skill the student missed only on harder material is listed as “next to learn,” not as a gap. Pacing is used only for public-school transfers whose last school teaches the skill later than yours. There is no running score and no red X, and the session is built to finish on material the student can do. The proctor script sets that frame before the first question.

Names and records stay with the school that tested the child, and each school’s data is used only for that school. It is never combined with other schools’ data, never sold, and never used for advertising, marketing, case studies or leads. The full terms are in our privacy policy and the school data agreement each school signs.

We collect the minimum: name, incoming grade, a short parent intake form, responses, and the reports. Your school authorizes the testing under a written agreement with us, and the parent reads a plain notice before the test starts.

That is your call. Many schools already charge a testing or application fee. Placement costs the school $25 per test or $999 a year unlimited, so a school charging a fee of $25 or more covers the platform. The Bridge Plan is always free to the family.

Not yet. For now the test is taken on campus with a proctor. At-home screening is built, and it would mark its report “remote screening, confirm on campus,” but it stays off until our counsel has reviewed it. We will say so here when it is available.

The admissions report is printable and documents a consistent, criteria-based placement process: the same instrument and the same versioned thresholds applied to every applicant, with the reasoning shown. Whether that satisfies a specific standard is your accreditor’s call, and we do not claim any accreditor’s approval. A school that keeps these reports on file can show a visiting team how every placement was made.