Gifted & Talented
Free CogAT Grade 4 Practice Test 2026
Cognitive Abilities Test — Grade 4 (Level 10)
259
Questions
9
Topics
Percentile-based — each district sets its own cutoff
Passing Score
60m
Time Limit
What the CogAT Grade 4 test is
Fourth graders usually sit CogAT Level 10. For many children this is a second encounter rather than a first, and the practical difference from Level 9 is less about new kinds of reasoning than about density - the vocabulary is wider, the number rules combine two steps rather than one, and the figure items begin applying two changes at once. Grade 4 is one of the most common screening years in the country, so for a great many families this is the sitting that actually decides placement.
How the Level 10 test is structured
Level 10 runs to about 176 questions across the same nine subtests, three per battery, each separately timed at roughly ten minutes. Total testing time is around ninety minutes, usually broken across two or three sessions. The subtest structure is identical to Level 9 - what changes is the difficulty of the items inside it, not the shape of the test.
What this site covers for grade 4
All nine subtests are available for grade 4 — 259 original questions in total, enough to sit a full-length practice test across every battery the real Level 10 covers.
Ready: Verbal Analogies, Sentence Completion, Verbal Classification.
Ready: Number Analogies, Number Series, Number Puzzles.
Ready: Figure Matrices, Figure Classification, Paper Folding.
Because all nine subtests are covered, grade 4 can also run the 15-minute Quick Check — three questions from every subtest, timed, ending in a report on where your child ran out of time and which formats they had not met.
What the scores mean
The report gives a Standard Age Score, an age percentile rank and a stanine for each battery and for the composite, plus an Ability Profile summarising the shape of the three scores. Because the percentile is against children of the same age in months rather than the same grade, a young fourth grader is not penalised for being young. Cutoffs for gifted identification are set district by district and vary considerably.
There is more detail on how the numbers relate to each other in the CogAT score guide, and on reading the score shape in the ability profile guide.
How to prepare for grade 4
By grade 4 the useful work has shifted from format familiarity to method. This is the level where guessing from a half-found rule starts to fail, because the wrong answers are built to reward exactly that - so the habit worth teaching is stating the rule out loud and checking it against the second example before answering. Pace matters too: at roughly thirty seconds a question, a child who is accurate but slow will leave marks on the table. Short timed sets are more useful now than untimed practice.
Common questions about the CogAT in grade 4
How is Level 10 different from Level 9?
The structure is identical - nine subtests, three batteries, the same timing. What changes is inside the items: wider vocabulary, number rules that combine two operations, and figure items that apply two changes at once rather than one.
My child took this in grade 3. Will practice help the second time?
Less than it did the first time, because most of the first-time gain was format shock and that is already spent. The remaining gains are in pace and in method - specifically, not answering from a partially found rule.
Should we practise with a timer?
At this level, yes, for at least some of it. The real test allows about thirty seconds per question, and a child who has only ever practised untimed will not have discovered that being accurate is not the same as being finished.