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 the question they came with is still open: is this child where a child their age should be?

Here is our half of the answer first, because it is the half this page exists for. Test My Kid is a check you start at home whenever you like. No school, no teacher, no district account, no appointment and no testing window. It is ten questions, about eight minutes, and the result names a grade and says whether your child is approaching, meeting or exceeding it. It shows every question with your child's answer, including for a parent who never makes an account.

Now Khan's half, scoped to what Khan itself publishes. Khan says teachers assign the Readiness Check once, and files it under features for teachers in its USA partner districts. It says the Readiness Check only includes content below a student's current grade level. Its Interim Assessments do report against grade-level standards, and Khan says these assessments are currently available to participating districts, for grade 6 and up. Both of those are built for schools.

And the concession, up front, because it is the biggest fact on the page. Khan Academy is free and it teaches, and nothing here is going to suggest you stop using it. For most families Khan is the right thing to keep. What follows is what each one measures, who each measurement is built for, and where each of us is genuinely the better choice.

What Khan Academy actually is

Khan Academy is a free library of instruction and practice, run by a 501(c)(3) 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. Khan's math shelf runs from early math and kindergarten through eighth grade and on into high school and college, 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 a lot turns on it. Khan's mastery percentage is always a share of the skills in one course, or in one unit of it. Which course is an input, chosen before any of the measuring starts.

What Test My Kid is

Test My Kid is a math and reading assessment of about eight minutes, taken at home whenever you like, with the parent as the customer rather than a school district. Ten questions, and in math each skill gets harder after a right answer and easier after a wrong one. The output is a position: approaching, meeting or exceeding a named grade, with every question and your child's answer. A signed-in family also sees up to three topics that came back shaky, each backed by the questions your child missed.

Then it very nearly stops. There is no instruction of any kind: no videos, no lessons, no explanations, nothing that teaches a concept. A signed-in family also gets printable practice worksheets, built from the topics your child actually missed and pitched to where that topic sits, with an answer key. 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 with a free library of instruction and practice, run by a nonprofit, the honest thing to say is that the stopping is the product and not a missing feature.

The first math check is free and needs no account and no card, and its result shows every question with your child's answer. Reading needs a free account. After a thirty-day trial, continuing costs $99 a year for the whole family, and past results stay readable. You can see a sample report without signing up for anything.

Khan has several things that look like a test

Most comparisons of these two understate how much assessment Khan has. A parent who has ever assigned a Course Challenge knows better. Most of it measures one course or a piece of one. Two of them reach further, the Readiness Check and the Interim Assessments, and both are built for schools.

Course challenges are 30 questions long and cover all the skills across the entire course. A unit test is a minimum of 9 questions covering one unit. Quizzes are a minimum of 5 questions long and cover the skills in a particular lesson, and practice exercises are 4-7 questions long.

Mastery Challenges always consist of 6 questions that review 3 skills, two questions each. Khan says that for now, however, Mastery Challenges are only available in Math courses, and adds that over time, we plan to introduce Mastery Challenges for all mastery-enabled courses. A Mastery Challenge also unlocks only once the child has reached the Familiar level on at least 3 skills and the Proficient level on at least 1 skill, and Khan says you can also only complete one Mastery Challenge per 12-hour period. A child arriving today has some practising to do first.

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 the first group has in common. Each of them measures performance inside a course that somebody already selected, and Khan's own homeschool guide is candid about who does that job: step one is to peruse the Khan Academy 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 only includes content below grade level

Khan's Readiness Check is a single adaptive assessment with approximately 36 questions, designed for the start of the school year. Khan says it helps you understand which skills from earlier grades your students may benefit from practicing, which is what makes it reach past the course a child happens to be sitting in. It is the natural place to look for an answer to our parent's question.

It is not built to give one, 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.

Khan publishes that sentence itself, and 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. Khan says students will not receive questions from their current course or more advanced courses, so the Readiness Check can tell you a child has gaps, and by design it cannot report that a child is at or above grade level. A clean sweep means only that no gaps were found below that line.

Khan also files the Readiness Check under features for teachers in its USA partner districts, and says teachers assign the Readiness Check once. For a fuller version of this argument, 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. The same page has a class setup section telling teachers they can add scores and monitor progress for their students. You supply the numbers. Khan supplies the practice.

This one feature is built on the assumption that somebody else did the measuring. In a school that uses MAP, that works: the district gives the test, and Khan turns the result into practice. At home, if nobody gave the test, 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 here, because Khan Academy Interim Assessments do report against grade-level standards, which is close to what we do.

Khan says its Interim Assessments are designed to measure progress on key grade-level math and ELA concepts, and are intended to be taken at key moments during the school year, like 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 close, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: theirs say whether a student is below or meeting grade-level expectations, ours say where in the named grade a child sits. The distinction that matters for a parent is not capability. It is access.

Khan says these assessments are currently available to participating districts, for grade 6 and up, which leaves a child in kindergarten through fifth grade outside the product entirely. Khan says Interim Assessments are not currently available for Texas. Every one of them is in Pilot or Beta rather than Live: Khan says its Pilot assessments are not adaptive and do not include scores and are not intended to be used for instructional decisions, says its Beta assessments are still in development and may not yet include features like percentiles, and describes percentiles as a feature of the Live phase. Khan also says score availability and reporting depend on the assessment's phase, and that in some cases, data may be used for internal insights but not shared directly with students or families.

So the accurate sentence is about access rather than capability. If Khan ships these to families, this page will need rewriting, and the review log will say so.

Where Khan is the better choice

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

Khan Academy is free and it teaches: its own homeschool guide says all content is completely free. Khan covers math, English language arts, science, social studies, computing, economics, life skills and test prep, which is ground we have never touched. Khan Academy offers content in multiple languages, created by experts, and we are English only. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and it states its mission at the foot of every khanacademy.org page we read: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.

At the youngest end Khan covers ground our Grade 1 floor does not: Khan has kindergarten math, first grade math and second grade math as real courses. Khan's homeschool guide also says: if your child is under the age of 7, or working on foundational skills, we recommend checking out Khan Academy Kids. 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.

One more, because it is the kind of thing a comparison page usually hides. A 45-minute diagnostic sees more of a child than ten questions do, and its per-skill detail is finer than ours. If what you want is the fullest possible picture in one sitting, ten questions is not it.

Reading is where the coverage flips

Math is the fair fight. Khan's math shelf runs from early math and kindergarten through eighth grade and on into high school and college, 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 shelf is titled 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.

That is the lesson shelf. The stronger point is about the reading assessment, where Khan states its own range. Khan says its Interim Assessments are designed to measure progress on key grade-level math and ELA concepts, and that these assessments are currently available to participating districts, for grade 6 and up in both mathematics and English language arts. The grade 6, 7 and 8 ELA assessments are Pilot ones with no scores or reporting included yet. We assess reading from grade 1 through grade 8, on public-domain passages, and report it with the same approaching, meeting or exceeding words as the math, though multiple-choice reading asks more before it says exceeding: next-grade passages read well. For a parent who wants to know how a first, second, third, fourth or fifth grader is reading against grade level, that is where we are the better choice, and it is not a close call either. For a twelve-year-old it turns back the other way: Khan's 6th grade course combines reading, grammar and vocabulary, and what we add is the measurement plus printable worksheets on the topics your child missed, which are reps rather than teaching.

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.

Where we are the better choice

We answer the grade-level question at home, whenever you like, in about eight minutes, with no school in the loop: a named grade, whether your child is approaching, meeting or exceeding it, and every question with your child's answer. Khan describes its Interim Assessments as a way for teachers and schools to assess student understanding, and files the Readiness Check under features for teachers in its USA partner districts.

The underrated part is that you can ask again. A check runs as often as every two weeks. Each starts from the last measured level, and a math check can start at your child's school grade when one of the last two reached grade level. A signed-in family sees every result charted against the grade expected on the date of that test. That is how a parent sees whether the practice is moving their child. Khan times its nearest instruments to the school year instead: Khan says the Readiness Check is designed to be used at the beginning of the school year, and that teachers assign the Readiness Check once, and that its Interim Assessments are intended to be taken at key moments during the school year, like mid-year and end-of-year.

And the report is written for you rather than for a district. If you want the longer version of either question, 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 nine rows point at Khan Academy, one points at both, and two point 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 one product for the teaching and one for the direction. Khan tracks progress inside its own courses, and says your skill level can move up or down based on your performance as you continue practicing. A check with us adds a position against a named grade, as often as every two weeks, with a chart for a signed-in family. The same split works with game-based programs like Prodigy and with IXL, which we cover in our IXL comparison. If Khan is already working for your family, keep it. 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

We read these Khan pages by hand, in a browser, on the date shown above each table. 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, which Khan offers for supporting learning across schools, because none appears on the Khan pages we read. We did not investigate Khan Academy Kids beyond the fact that Khan points parents of under-sevens to it, and we have treated Khan's ELA catalog page as evidence about that page rather than about the whole site.

The most perishable row here is the interim assessments one. Khan updated that article shortly before this page was published, and which assessments are Pilot, which are Beta, which grades they cover and whether Texas is excluded can 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.