Gifted & Talented Testing
CogAT Test: Parent Guide & Free Practice
Cognitive Abilities Test — Verbal, Quantitative & Nonverbal
Used by about half of US districts to identify students for gifted programs. Here is what it measures, what your child will see, and how to make sense of the score report.
Practice by grade
Free questions with a full explanation after every answer.
The three batteries
Nine subtests in total, three per battery. Each battery gets its own score, and the three together give the composite.
Verbal Battery
Reasoning with words — how flexibly a child can see relationships between ideas expressed in language. From grade 3 up these are read independently; below that they are read aloud.
- Verbal Analogies — complete the pair: sun is to day as moon is to ___
- Sentence Completion — choose the word that best fits the sentence
- Verbal Classification — three words share something — find the fourth
Quantitative Battery
Reasoning with numbers and quantity. Not arithmetic drill — the numbers stay simple, and what is being tested is whether the child can spot the underlying relationship.
- Number Analogies — [3 → 6] [4 → 8] [5 → ?]
- Number Series — infer the rule and continue the sequence
- Number Puzzles — solve for the unknown across equations
Nonverbal Battery
picture-basedReasoning with shapes and figures, using no words or numbers at all. Because it depends least on language and schooling, it often shows ability that the other two batteries miss — which matters for multilingual children.
- Figure Matrices — complete the grid by applying the same change
- Figure Classification — three figures share a property — find the fourth
- Paper Folding — predict the holes after the paper is unfolded
Which level does my child take?
CogAT levels follow age rather than grade, but for most children the two line up as below.
Already have the score report?
The report gives the same result three different ways — SAS, percentile and stanine. Convert between them and see what each one actually means.
CogAT score chart →Common questions
What is the CogAT test?
The Cognitive Abilities Test measures reasoning ability rather than what a child has been taught. It is used by roughly half of US school districts as part of gifted-and-talented identification. It has three batteries — Verbal, Quantitative and Nonverbal — each with three subtests.
Can you study for the CogAT?
You cannot cram reasoning ability, but familiarity matters a great deal. Children who have never seen a figure matrix or a number analogy lose time working out what the question is even asking. Practice removes that disadvantage, which is the honest case for preparing.
Which CogAT level does my child take?
Levels are set by age, not grade, though the two usually line up. A third grader normally takes Level 9, a fourth grader Level 10, and so on. Levels 5/6 through 8 cover kindergarten through second grade and are administered entirely with pictures.
CogAT® is a registered trademark of Riverside Assessments, LLC, which neither sponsors nor endorses this site. All practice questions are original and do not reproduce actual CogAT test items. Level and grade pairings are typical rather than universal — your child's school assigns the level.