Iowa Assessments for homeschoolers: what they measure and how to read the scores

You have decided, or your state has decided for you, that this is the year your homeschooler takes a standardized achievement test, and the name that keeps coming up is the Iowa. Then you start reading and it gets muddier: Form E, ITBS, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, a dozen resellers with different prices and different rules about who is even allowed to give it. You just want to know what the test is, how to get it, and what the scores will mean when they come back.

Here is the short version first. The Iowa test for homeschoolers is the Iowa Assessments, Form E, a nationally normed achievement test you order through a reseller and give at home on paper or online. The report comes back as a national percentile rank, a stanine, and a grade equivalent. The rest of this page is what it measures, who may give it, and how to read those three numbers without reading more into them than they can carry.

What the Iowa test for homeschoolers measures

The test most families mean is the Iowa Assessments, Form E, published by Riverside Insights. It is the direct descendant of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, the ITBS, which is why parents and some resellers still call it the ITBS or simply the Iowa. It is sold for grades K through 12. The complete battery covers reading, language arts, math, science, and social studies; shorter Survey and Core forms cover reading, language arts, and math only. It is nationally normed, which means your child's answers are scored against a national sample of students in the same grade. The current Forms E, F, and G were built on 2024 norms, so the comparison group is recent.

Format depends on how you order it. On paper, grades 3 and up are timed, while the youngest levels are often given untimed one on one. Online, the test is a scheduled live group session rather than something your child logs into whenever you like. That scheduling matters for a screen-light household: an online Iowa is a sitting at a computer on a set date, so if keeping your child off screens is the whole point of how you teach, the paper version is the one to ask the reseller about.

How to actually get it, and who may give it

You cannot buy the Iowa from Riverside. Families order it through a reseller: BJU Press, Seton Testing Services, Abeka, or the University of Minnesota. Some sell a paper student kit, often on a short rental you return after testing; others run online sessions on fixed dates. Prices are set by the reseller and move, so the reseller's own page is the only reliable place to check today's figure.

The question that trips up the most parents is who is allowed to give it, and the honest answer is that it depends on the reseller and the format, not on the test. It is not true that any parent can simply give the Iowa. Through Seton on paper, no college degree is required, but you sign a test agreement each year. Through BJU on paper, you apply to be an approved tester: a bachelor's degree is preferred but not required, a high school diploma is accepted on the application, and BJU notes that approved testers may test their own children where state law allows. For online sessions the reseller runs the test, with BJU assigning the administrator and you providing an on-site adult proctor who is at least 18, or Abeka acting as the administrator itself. Read the specific reseller's administrator rules before you order, because getting this wrong can mean a test that does not count.

One more wrinkle that surprises people: not every reseller ships every test to every state. Both Abeka and Seton, for example, do not sell the Iowa for use inside the state of Iowa. That is a reseller policy, not a rule that applies to every seller or every state, so if you hit a restriction, it is worth checking a second reseller rather than assuming the test is off-limits to you.

How to read the Iowa scores

When the report comes back, three numbers do most of the work, and they are easy to confuse. The most useful one is the national percentile rank, a number from 1 to 99 that compares your child to that national sample of same-grade students. A 60th percentile means your child scored higher than about 60 percent of that group. The 50th is the national median, not a disappointment, and this is the number that answers the question every parent is really asking. It works the same way a school report's percentile does, so if you have seen one before, our walk-through of what a percentile actually means on a score report reads across to the Iowa cleanly.

The second number is the stanine, short for "standard nine." It squeezes the whole percentile range into a single digit from 1 to 9, which makes it easy to read at a glance once you know the bands. The middle three, 4 through 6, are the average range, with 5 sitting dead center.

The third number, the grade equivalent, is the one parents misread most, and it is worth slowing down for. A grade equivalent written as 5.2 does not mean your third grader is ready for fifth-grade work. It means your child scored about what a typical student in the second month of fifth grade would have scored on this same grade-level test. It is a comparison, not a placement, and it gets unreliable the further it lands from your child's real grade, because the test never actually handed your third grader fifth-grade material. This is exactly the trap that the grade equivalent sets on school reports too, and we take it apart in how to read a grade equivalent without over-reading it. Let the percentile and stanine be the numbers you trust, and treat the grade equivalent as loose context.

One honest limit on all three: a single Iowa result is one dot on one day, usually once a year. A number that holds or climbs across two or three years tells you far more than any single score, and a one-year dip on a test your child took tired or rushed is not a verdict on anything.

Does the Iowa meet your state's requirement?

This is where families most want a yes or no, and the honest answer is that it depends on your state, not on the test. Some states set no assessment rule at all. Some ask for a nationally normed achievement test every year. Some accept a portfolio review or an evaluator's report instead of a test, and a few require testing only in certain grades. The Iowa is nationally normed and is one of the tests commonly named where a test is required, but which tests count, who may give them, and when the results are due are all set by your state's own rules. Read your state's official homeschool rules rather than a reseller's summary, and remember that a reseller embargo can keep a specific test out of a specific state regardless of whether your state would otherwise accept it.

Where a short home check fits alongside the Iowa

The Iowa is an annual event: you schedule it, your child sits it once, and the report arrives weeks later. That is the right rhythm for a formal achievement test, but it leaves eleven months where you are teaching every subject yourself with no outside read on whether it is landing. That gap is the one Test My Kid is built for, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not.

Test My Kid is not a nationally normed test, and it does not satisfy any state's homeschool requirement. It reports no percentile, no stanine, and no grade equivalent. What it does report is simpler and different: whether your child is approaching, meeting, or exceeding the standards for their named grade, and which topic to work on next. Each check, math or reading, takes about eight minutes on a screen, and then the practice moves to paper: with an account, the result becomes a printable worksheet for the skill that came up short. The first assessment is free, it covers grades 1 to 8, and it is calibrated to the NWEA MAP and iReady benchmarks schools use. Our page for homeschool families lays out how a placement test, a once-a-year achievement test like the Iowa, and a short repeatable check each do a different job across a homeschool year.

Used together they cover each other's blind spots. The Iowa gives you the formal, nationally normed number your state may ask for. A short check in between tells you where your child stands against the grade month to month, so a soft spot the Iowa would not reveal until next spring shows up while there is still time to work on it. If you want to see what an at-home read can and cannot tell you before you lean on one, we were candid about the limits in whether a free at-home check can stand in for a school test, and if the question underneath all of this is simply whether your child is keeping pace, start with how to tell if your child is on track. The Iowa answers one question well, once a year. Knowing where your child stands the rest of the year is a different job, and both are worth doing.

Last reviewed: October 27, 2026.