Test My Kid vs Buying MAP Growth at Home

Most articles that answer this question assume you cannot buy the real test, and then sell you something else. That assumption is wrong, so this page starts by correcting it. NWEA MAP Growth, the assessment a large share of American schools use two or three times a year, can be purchased for home use. Homeschool Boss sells it. The base package covering math and reading is $60 for a first student.

There is a real catch, and it is not the price. It is who is allowed to buy it. If your child is enrolled in a school, Homeschool Boss states that it typically is not allowed to test them. That single sentence decides this comparison for most people reading it, which is why it appears this high rather than buried under a feature table.

What Homeschool Boss actually sells

Homeschool Boss is a reseller of NWEA MAP Growth. It describes itself as NWEA's exclusive partner for providing MAP Growth and MAP Reading Fluency to small private schools, and it sells the same assessments to homeschooling families and to homeschool co-ops that meet regularly.

What you are buying is the genuine instrument, not a practice version or an imitation of it. MAP Growth is computer-adaptive: the difficulty moves with your child's answers, so the test converges on their level rather than asking everyone the same questions. It reports a RIT score, which NWEA describes as grade-level independent, meaning the number means the same thing in third grade as it does in seventh and can be tracked across years. That is the property that makes it useful to a district, and it is the property a parent is usually trying to get hold of when they go looking for it.

The eligibility rules are published and worth reading before you plan around them. Homeschoolers are allowed. Co-ops that meet regularly are allowed, with group pricing from five students. Small private schools are allowed. Students who are enrolled in a school typically are not, though Homeschool Boss invites you to ask about unusual situations. Students applying to Gifted and Talented programs are explicitly excluded, and retesting to raise a score for that purpose is prohibited outright. The tests may not be used as test preparation.

What Test My Kid is

Test My Kid is an eight-minute adaptive assessment in math and reading for children in kindergarten through eighth grade, taken at home, with the parent as the customer. It is calibrated to published NWEA MAP and iReady benchmarks, which means the levels it reports are anchored to the same reference points schools use. It is not those tests, and this page will not imply that it is.

Ten questions is enough to place a child's working level and to flag which topics are shaky. It is not enough to map every sub-skill, and a forty-five minute battery genuinely sees more of what a child can do. That trade was made on purpose. A short assessment is one a family will actually run again in a month, and the second reading is where almost all of the value is: one number tells you where a child is standing, two numbers tell you which way they are walking.

The first assessment is free and needs no account. After a thirty-day trial, continuing costs $99 a year for the whole family, and past reports stay free to read whatever you decide. It is a diagnostic. It does not teach, and on a page comparing it to a teaching program the honest answer is often to buy the teaching program.

Where the money actually goes

The two prices are not comparing the same unit, and lining them up without saying so would be misleading. Homeschool Boss charges per student per testing event. Test My Kid charges per family per year. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how many children you have and how often you want a reading.

For a single child taking one official test a year, $60 is straightforwardly good value and cheaper than us. That is worth saying plainly. The arithmetic only turns the other way when you have more than one child, or when you want to look more than once a year, and neither of those is a universal situation.

Which one should you use?

Three of those seven rows point away from us, and one points at neither of us. That is not modesty, it is the actual answer. A comparison where the publisher wins every row is an advertisement, and you can tell.

What a RIT score actually tells you

This is the part almost nobody explains, and it is the reason a lot of parents go looking for the test in the first place: they were handed a number and could not do anything with it.

A RIT score is not a percentage and not a grade. It sits on a scale that runs roughly from the 140s in the early years to the 200s and beyond by middle school, and its useful property is that it does not reset each year. A child who scored 195 in third grade and 205 in fifth grade grew by ten points on the same ruler. That is the whole design goal, and it is why districts like it: it turns a series of annual snapshots into a line.

On its own, a single RIT score answers almost nothing. It becomes meaningful in two ways. Against the norms, it converts to a percentile, which tells you where your child sits relative to other children in the same grade at the same point in the year. Against your child's own earlier scores, it tells you the growth, which is the number most worth watching, because a child can be below the median and growing faster than the median at the same time. Those two children, one at the fiftieth percentile and flat, one at the thirtieth and climbing, need different conversations, and only the second number distinguishes them.

The trap is reading a single point as a verdict. Adaptive tests have a standard error, published by NWEA, of roughly three RIT points, so a four-point drop between two sittings is very often nothing at all. If you buy one test and treat the number as a grade, you have spent $60 to acquire an anxiety. The number earns its keep on the second sitting.

"On grade level" and "fiftieth percentile" are not the same claim

These two products answer subtly different questions, and the difference trips up more parents than any other part of this subject. It is worth two minutes because it changes how you read whatever number you end up with.

A percentile is norm-referenced. It compares your child to other children. The fiftieth percentile means half the children in that grade, at that point in the year, scored lower. It is a statement about the population, and it moves if the population moves. If a cohort loses ground nationally, a child can hold the same percentile while knowing less than last year's child at the same rank.

"Meeting grade level" is criterion-referenced. It compares your child to a fixed description of what the grade is supposed to cover. It does not care what other children did. A whole class can meet the criterion, or none of them can.

Both are useful and they answer different worries. If your worry is "will my child be prepared for what comes next", the criterion is closer to what you mean. If your worry is "is my child keeping up with their peers", the percentile is. MAP Growth leads with the norm-referenced view, because that is what a district needs in order to compare schools and years. Our report leads with the criterion view, because that is closer to the question a parent asks at the kitchen table.

The practical consequence is that a child can be at the sixtieth percentile and still not have a firm grip on the grade's content, if the cohort as a whole is behind. Reading a percentile as a reassurance about readiness is a common and understandable mistake. When you get any number back, from anyone, the first thing worth asking is which of these two things it is telling you.

What the testing actually involves

Buying MAP Growth at home is not the same experience as clicking a link. The test is proctored, which means an adult supervises the session and the reseller sets up credentials for your student in advance. That arrangement takes a few days, so this is something to plan rather than do on the afternoon the question occurs to you.

The sitting itself is untimed but substantial. Schools generally allow around an hour per subject, and younger children often need a break in the middle. Because the test is adaptive, your child will find it genuinely hard: a well-calibrated adaptive test aims for something close to half the questions answered correctly, so a child who comes out saying it was difficult has had the intended experience rather than a bad one. It is worth telling them that beforehand. Plenty of capable children finish an adaptive test convinced they failed.

Two subjects means two sittings, so a math and reading package is realistically two mornings rather than one. For a family doing this annually for record-keeping, that is a reasonable ask. For a family trying to answer "is the tutoring working" in November, it is a lot of scheduling for one data point.

Before you buy anything, ask the school

If your child is enrolled in a school, there is a strong chance the school already has exactly the number you are about to buy, and the reason to check first is not thrift. It is that a score the school already holds comes with the norms, the growth history, and a teacher who can talk about it.

We would rather you spend nothing and ask the school than buy anything from us on a misunderstanding. A page that skipped this section would convert slightly better and deserve less trust.

What to do when the number comes back low

This is the situation most parents are actually in when they start reading, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a product.

First, resist acting on one reading. A single below-median result on a single day is weak evidence, and the standard error alone accounts for a few points in either direction. Before rearranging a child's afternoons, get a second reading, ideally by a different route from the first.

Second, find out whether the gap is broad or narrow. A child who is behind across every topic in a subject has a different problem from one who is on level everywhere except fractions. The first suggests something foundational or something about how the subject is being taught to them; the second is a specific hole that a few weeks of targeted work often closes. Any assessment worth using should tell you which of those you are looking at, and if the report you have does not, that is a limitation of the report rather than a fact about your child.

Third, change one thing and measure again. Not three things. If you add a tutoring programme, twenty minutes of nightly reading, and a summer workbook all at once, a better number in March tells you that something worked and nothing about what. Parents pay for enrichment for years without ever finding out which part of it mattered, and the reason is almost always that too much changed between readings.

Fourth, keep the child out of it. The number is management information for the adults. A child who learns their score and hears it discussed as a verdict starts to treat their own ability as a fixed quantity, which is the opposite of what any of this is for. What helps is naming the specific thing to practise and the effort that moves it.

What neither of them does

Neither teaches. Both tell you where a child is standing; neither moves them. If the answer comes back lower than you hoped, the next purchase is instruction, and that is a different page and a different budget.

Neither replaces what the school already has. If your child is enrolled, the school very likely has MAP or iReady results already, and asking for them costs nothing. A parent who has not asked should ask before spending anything at all, and we would rather say that than sell around it.

Neither is a diagnosis. A short assessment and a long one can both tell you a child is behind in a subject. Neither can tell you why, and a persistent, unexplained gap is a conversation with the school and possibly a psychoeducational evaluation, not a purchase from either of us.

How to tell whether it is working

Whatever you choose, the thing worth setting up is a second reading. One number is a dot. Two numbers, taken far enough apart to mean something, are a direction, and a direction is what actually answers the question parents are asking when they go looking for a test.

If you buy MAP Growth, the natural rhythm is the one schools use: two or three sittings across the year, spaced enough that growth is plausible. If you use something shorter, the rhythm can be tighter, and the discipline is to resist reading too much into a single move. A child who slept badly produces a lower number, and that is not a trend.

Either way, write down what you changed between readings. A tutoring programme started, twenty minutes of reading added at bedtime, a summer with none of it. Without that, a second number tells you what happened but not what caused it, and the entire point of measuring twice is to find out whether the thing you are paying for is doing anything.

You can see the shape of that on our sample analysis, which is a real report rather than a marketing mock-up.

How we checked this

Every price and rule attributed to Homeschool Boss on this page was read from their own site on 7 September 2026, at the two pages linked in the table cells above. The description of MAP Growth as computer-adaptive and of the RIT scale as grade-level independent comes from NWEA's own product page, read the same day.

We did not take any of these figures from another company's comparison article. That matters more than it sounds: most pages comparing programs for children are published by companies selling a competing programme, and prices in this space circulate for years after they stop being true. If a number here is wrong, it is our error and we will date the correction rather than quietly editing it.

Test My Kid's own facts come from our product: eight minutes, ten adaptive questions, math and reading, kindergarten through eighth grade, first assessment free, $99 a year per family after a thirty-day trial, past reports free to read. We are invite-only at the time of writing.