Which entrance exam does your school require?

You cannot guess this from the type of school

We read the admissions requirements for 154 of the most sought-after private and Catholic high schools in California, Dallas–Fort Worth and the New York metro. Three things almost every family gets wrong:

• The exam is regional, and "Catholic" tells you nothing. In California, 24 of the 30 Catholic high schools we checked use the HSPT. In Dallas–Fort Worth, not one of the 33 schools we checked uses the HSPT — the Catholic schools there run on the ISEE. In New York, the diocesan schools use a fourth exam entirely, the TACHS, while the Jesuit schools — Regis, Xavier, Fordham Prep, Loyola — use the HSPT. Same church, three different tests, depending on the city.
• If you're in North Jersey, don't buy a COOP book. The COOP program still runs across the Archdiocese of Newark and the Diocese of Paterson — but it now states it "will be using the High School Placement Test (HSPT®) for the 2026 administration." The program kept its name; the test changed. Prep the HSPT.
• Some schools won't take an outside score. Menlo School will not accept an ISEE, SSAT or HSPT from a Bay Area family. Cathedral Catholic dropped the HSPT for its own exam. Regis tells families not to list it on the TACHS form at all — it runs its own sitting.

Getting this wrong costs a family a summer — and the HSPT is usually a single sitting, so there is often no second try. Applying in Dallas? See every deadline too →

Confirm before you build a plan around this. Requirements change every admissions cycle, and a handful of these schools are still serving last year's page. Every row links to the source we read it from — open it. Spot something out of date? Email info@prepgurus.com and we'll fix it.