Test My Kid vs Khan Academy

A parent who types "Khan Academy alternative" into Google is usually not unhappy with Khan Academy. They are unhappy with not knowing. Their child has been working on Khan for months, the dashboard is full of green, and they still cannot answer the question they actually have: is this child where a child their age should be?

So the useful comparison is not which of these two is better. Khan Academy is free, it is one of the great public goods of the internet, and nothing on this page is going to suggest you stop using it. The useful comparison is what each one measures, and whether the thing you want measured is something Khan has ever set out to measure.

What Khan Academy actually is

Khan Academy is a free library of instruction and practice, run by a nonprofit. A child works inside a course, and a course is made of units, units are made of lessons, and lessons mix articles, videos and practice exercises. Its math shelf alone runs from early math and kindergarten counting through eighth grade and on to multivariable calculus, with parallel ladders aligned to Illustrative Mathematics, Eureka, and the standards of individual states.

Progress is expressed in mastery levels. Khan has five of them: not started, attempted, familiar, proficient and mastered, earned by percent correct on exercises, with mastered reserved for getting a skill right on a mixed assessment when you are already proficient. A course mastery percentage is then the share of skills in that one course sitting at proficient or above.

Read that definition again, because it is the whole story. Every number Khan shows a parent is a percentage of a course. Which course is an input, chosen by an adult before any of the measuring starts.

What Test My Kid is

Test My Kid is an eight-minute adaptive assessment in math and reading, taken at home, with the parent as the customer rather than a school district. Ten questions, each one chosen by how the last was answered. The output is a position: approaching, meeting or exceeding a named grade, plus up to three topics that came back shaky, each one backed by the questions your child actually missed.

Then it very nearly stops. There is no instruction of any kind: no videos, no lessons, no explanations, nothing that teaches a concept. We do print practice worksheets off the back of the report, built from the topics your child actually missed, but a worksheet is reps rather than teaching, and if the concept has not landed a worksheet will not land it either. On a page comparing us to the largest free teaching resource in the world, the honest thing to say is that the stopping is the product and not a missing feature. The first assessment is free and math needs no account at all. After a thirty-day trial, continuing costs $99 a year for the whole family. You can see a sample report without signing up for anything.

Khan has five things that look like a test

This is where most comparisons of these two go wrong. They say Khan has no assessment, which is false, and a parent who has seen a Course Challenge knows it is false, so the rest of the page loses its credibility. Khan has plenty of assessment. It is just all pointed somewhere else.

A Course Challenge is 30 questions covering the skills across an entire course. A unit test is a minimum of 9 questions covering one unit. A quiz is a minimum of 5 and covers one lesson, and a practice exercise is 4 to 7 questions on a handful of skills.

A Mastery Challenge is 6 questions reviewing 3 skills, two questions each, and Khan says it is available in math courses only. It is also locked until the child has already reached familiar on at least three skills and proficient on at least one, and only one can be started every twelve hours. A child arriving today cannot take one at all.

The Readiness Check is the interesting one, and it gets its own section below. The Interim Assessments are the newest, and they get one too.

Notice what every item in that first group has in common. Each of them measures performance inside a course that somebody already selected. None of them selects the course. Khan's own homeschool guide is candid about who does that job: step one is to peruse the content library and make a list of what you think your child should focus on. The parent supplies the judgement, and the judgement is the part the parent came here without.

The Readiness Check never asks a grade-level question

Khan's Readiness Check is a genuine adaptive assessment of about 36 questions, designed for the start of the school year, and it is the only Khan instrument that crosses course boundaries to find out what a child knows. If Khan were going to answer our parent's question anywhere, it would be here.

It does not, and Khan says why in one sentence on its own help page: the Readiness Check only includes content below a student's current grade level, and students will not receive questions from their current course or more advanced courses. Khan adds, in the same article, that it is designed to guide personalized practice and is not a formal diagnostic or standardized assessment.

That is not a limitation Khan is hiding. It is the correct design for what the tool is for. If your job is to build a practice plan of prerequisite skills, asking questions above the child's grade is wasted time. But it has a consequence a parent needs spelled out: an instrument that only asks questions from earlier grades can tell you a child has gaps, and can never tell you a child is ahead. A perfect score means only that no gaps were found below where they already are.

And it is assigned by a teacher, inside the paid districts product. If you are reading this from a parent account, it is not a thing you can start. For a fuller version of this argument, including what the Khan dashboard does and does not flag, see our longer piece on what parents are missing with Khan Academy.

Khan's own MAP feature begins by asking you for the score

This is the single most clarifying thing on Khan's site, and almost nobody writing about Khan mentions it.

Khan has a whole section of math called MAP Recommended Practice, 55 units of it, organised into bands by NWEA MAP RIT score: operations and algebraic thinking under 159, 159 to 175, 176 to 188, and so on up through 229 and above, across geometry, measurement and data, numbers and operations, and statistics and probability. It looks, at a glance, exactly like the thing a parent wants.

Open it and the page says: use NWEA MAP Test scores to generate personalized study recommendations. Underneath is a form. Fill in the lower score for each MAP Test Goal Performance Area, it says, with four empty boxes and a link reading where do I find my scores. You supply the numbers. Khan supplies the practice.

That is the architecture of Khan Academy in one screen. Khan is superb at the half of the problem that comes after measurement, and it has been built throughout on the assumption that somebody else did the measuring. In a school that is true: the district gives the MAP test in the autumn and Khan turns the result into practice. At home, nobody gave the test, so the form has nothing to put in it. If you want to understand what those RIT numbers mean before you go looking for them, we have a plain-English explainer on iReady and NWEA MAP. Khan also labels this feature a prototype that may change or disappear at any time, which is worth knowing before you build a routine on it.

Where Khan is genuinely building what we do

Everything above would be a rigged comparison if we stopped there, because Khan is now building an actual grade-level assessment and it is good.

Khan Academy Interim Assessments are short standards-aligned tests taken at mid-year and end-of-year. The math versions adapt question by question and the ELA versions adapt after groups of questions. They are scored with item response theory on a scale Khan describes as about 300 to 900, with cut scores set by panels of subject matter experts, and they report three performance levels: beginning, approaching and demonstrating, defined in terms of performing below or meeting grade-level expectations.

If that sounds a lot like approaching, meeting and exceeding, it is, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The distinction that matters for a parent is not capability. It is access.

Khan's interim assessments run only through participating districts. They cover grades 6, 7 and 8 plus high school math and ELA, which means nothing at all for a child in kindergarten through fifth grade. They are not currently available in Texas. And every single one of them is in Pilot or Beta rather than Live, which by Khan's own definition means performance levels and percentiles are not finished yet. So the accurate sentence is that a parent at home cannot get one, not that Khan cannot do this. If Khan ships these to families, this page will need rewriting, and the review log will say so.

What Khan does that we do not

It teaches, and we have no instruction of any kind. That is the big one and it is not close.

It is free, and Khan's homeschool guide says all content is completely free in those words. It covers subjects we have never touched and a grade range that runs past us in both directions. It is a nonprofit, so there is no commercial pressure on what it recommends.

And at the youngest end it simply beats us. Khan has kindergarten math, first grade math and second grade math as real courses, and points parents of under-sevens to Khan Academy Kids on top of that. Our math and reading both start at Grade 1. A kindergartner can sit our test, but they will be served Grade 1 items and measured against a Grade 1 floor, which is a fair reading for a child at the top of that year and a blunt one for a child at the start of it.

Reading is where the coverage flips

Math is the fair fight. Khan's math shelf covers every grade we do and plenty we do not, so on math the whole comparison is about what gets measured rather than what gets taught.

Reading runs the other way, and it is the part of this comparison nobody writes about. Khan's English language arts page titles itself 3rd to 10th grade. The full courses that combine reading, grammar and vocabulary start at 5th. Below that the shelf thins quickly: 4th grade is reading and vocabulary without the grammar, and the 2nd and 3rd grade reading courses are three units each, on fairy tales, the moon, pets, homes and extreme environments. There is no 1st grade or kindergarten reading on khanacademy.org at all, which is the other reason Khan sends parents of under-sevens to its separate Kids app.

We assess reading from grade 1 through grade 8, on public-domain passages, and report it on the same approaching, meeting or exceeding scale as the math. So for a seven-year-old whose parent wants to know whether the reading is coming along, Khan has little to offer on its main site and the measurement is the thing we actually built. For a twelve-year-old it reverses again: Khan has a substantial reading and grammar course for that age, and we still only have the measurement.

This matters more than the math case because reading level is the harder of the two to spot at home. Most parents can tell when long division is not landing. Whether a child is reading at grade level is much less visible from the kitchen table, which is why we wrote a separate piece on how to tell if your child is reading at grade level.

What we do that Khan does not

We answer the question in the title, in about eight minutes, from a parent account, without a school in the loop. Nothing in Khan does that for a family at home, and the reason is structural rather than an oversight: Khan's measurement products are sold to districts because districts are who test children.

Being short is the underrated part. A number you can get again in a fortnight shows a direction, and a direction is what tells you whether the Khan practice is working. One long sitting a year cannot do that. If you want the reverse view, where a child looks fine and the parent wants to know how far ahead, we have written about how to tell whether a child is on track in math and about the signals that a child has fallen behind.

Use both, and here is the split

Six of those eight rows point at Khan Academy, one points at both, and one points at us. We have counted them on purpose, because a comparison page published by one of the two products should be checkable on its own arithmetic.

The combination that actually makes sense is Khan for the teaching and an outside check every few weeks for the direction. Khan cannot grade its own homework, and neither can any other learning program: a practice product reporting on whether its own practice is working has an obvious conflict, which is the same argument we make about game-based programs like Prodigy and about IXL on our IXL comparison. If Khan is working for your family, the thing to add is a measurement, not a different program.

And if the honest answer for you is that free is enough, take it. We would rather you kept the $99 than bought a second opinion you do not need.

How we checked this, and what we left out

Every Khan figure and quotation above was read from Khan's own site and help centre on 17 September 2026, in a browser. That last detail is load-bearing: khanacademy.org renders in the browser, so every URL on the domain returns the same small empty shell to an automated fetch, and the help centre returns a challenge page. Anyone re-checking these with a script will conclude the pages are empty and be wrong.

We did not print a price for Khan Academy Districts or for the Learning Paths add-on, because Khan publishes neither and a parent cannot buy either at any price. We did not investigate Khan Academy Kids beyond the fact that Khan points parents of under-sevens to it. And we did not claim our own levels are calibrated against NWEA MAP or i-Ready benchmarks, which would have been the easiest sentence to write on a page that spends this long on RIT scores. Our alignment to those benchmarks has not been independently sourced, so it is not something we are going to assert next to somebody else's verified numbers.

The most perishable row here is the interim assessments one. Khan updated that article sixteen days before this page was published, and which assessments are Pilot, which are Beta, which grades are covered and whether Texas is excluded can all change inside a single school year. If you are reading this well after the date at the top, check it against Khan before you rely on it, and tell us if it has moved.