The SHSAT’s ELA Section Reads at a 10th-Grade Level, and There Are About 7,700 Words to Read

We counted every word in the four official practice forms and ran each passage through two readability formulas.

The reading passages on the SHSAT average a Flesch-Kincaid (FK) score of 10.9, the sentence and word profile of late tenth-grade writing, and the students reading them are eighth graders. They also read a lot of it. The ELA section holds roughly 4,600 words of passages and question stems, plus about 3,000 words of answer choices, for a total near 7,700 on the four official practice forms. All of it happens inside one 180-minute window shared with 50 math questions. There is no section timer, so students decide where to start and how to split their time, and they can't skip or go back except within a single passage.

The passages in this analysis come from the official 2026 Grade 8 practice tests (Forms A, B, C, and D) released by NYCPS and Pearson. The passages are theirs. The counting and the formulas are ours.

What the formulas measure

Flesch-Kincaid (FK) and Gunning Fog (GF) are two widely used formulas that estimate a grade level for a piece of writing by looking at how long its sentences are and how long its words are. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level estimates the grade at which a text is usually read, based on two things: how long the sentences are and how long the words are. A score of 10 means the writing looks like tenth-grade writing in those two respects, and each added point is roughly another grade. Gunning Fog is a cousin that weighs the share of long words (three syllables or more) more heavily, so it usually comes out higher. Neither formula reads for meaning, so neither can tell whether an argument is tricky or a topic is unfamiliar.

Readability formulas describe the length and structure of the language. Word counts tell us how much text students must work through. We use both because each answers a different question about what a student faces.

What the formulas found

The 22 prose passages average 10.9 on Flesch-Kincaid. Gunning Fog averages 13.2. Ten of the 22 passages score 11 or higher, three score above 14 (Invention of the Telegraph is the highest at 15.6), and only the excerpt from The Highest Tide falls below 8. That puts the average passage nearly three grade levels above the grade of the students taking the test.

The consistency matters more than the average. A 10.9 could come from a few very hard passages pulling up an easy test, but every form lands in the same neighborhood, with averages from 10.6 to 11.5, and no form reads easy by this measure. Relatively complex prose is a recurring feature of these four official forms. A grade-level score describes the writing, not the student. It doesn't mean an eighth grader can't understand these passages, and the SHSAT is an admissions test for specialized high schools, so it expects strong readers. A low score doesn't mean an easy passage either. The Highest Tide excerpt is literary prose that scores 7.2 and can still demand inference no sentence-length formula picks up, while A Memory Revolution scores 14.5 on long sentences and formal vocabulary, which says little on its own about how hard its ideas are.

How much there is to read

The four-form average is about 7,700 words: 4,600 in passages and question stems, and 3,000 in answer choices. We count the answer choices because students have to read them, and checking them often means going back into the passage.

For reading speed we used the Hasbrouck and Tindal 2017 reading fluency norms for Grade 8, which put the typical eighth grader at about 165 words per minute in the fall. One in four reads 131 or fewer. If a student reads every word once, the ELA section takes about 46 minutes at the typical pace, about a quarter of the 180 minutes, and about 58 minutes at the slower pace, nearly a third.

We think those numbers run low. The norms come from reading aloud, so silent readers may be a little faster, but the table counts a single pass through the text, and it doesn't count the rereading that answer choices invite. Poems also take longer per word than prose, which the norms never measured.

The poems

Six of the 28 passages are poems. They make up about 12% of the passage words and 40 of the 199 ELA questions, or 20%, and on Forms B and C they carry 13 and 14 questions, more than a quarter of the section.

The readability formulas don't reliably measure their difficulty. The six poems land anywhere from about 8 to 14 on Flesch-Kincaid, and the number has little to do with how hard a poem is to read, because line breaks and stanzas confuse a tool built to count sentences. We left the poems out of the reading level averages and counted them only in the volume and the time. A short poem isn't an easy one. A 153-word poem packs its meaning into images and word choices that a student has to work out line by line, and that can take longer than 300 words of plain prose.

What it adds up to

What makes the section hard is that everything lands at once: prose written near a tenth-grade level, thousands of words of it, poems no formula can size up, a clock shared with math, and a screen that limits going back. That adds up to a test of reading endurance as much as comprehension.

Endurance and pacing can be trained. Students who have read thousands of words of dense text in one sitting, on a screen, with a time budget for each passage, show up knowing what the section feels like. Practice should match the real test length, poetry included, because a student who has only practiced one passage at a time has never felt the full cognitive load of the test.

We've spent more than 20 years preparing students for these tests. This analysis is part of understanding what they actually demand. If you work in this field, you'll see things we missed: better measures, better questions, better ways to read these numbers. Please get in touch, we'd welcome your insights.

Every prose passage, ranked

The poems are left out because the formulas don't reliably measure their difficulty.

Sources: Official NYCPS/Pearson SHSAT Grade 8 practice tests, Forms A to D (2026). Hasbrouck and Tindal (2017) Grade 8 oral reading fluency norms, as published at readflare.com/articles/assessment-and-testing/hasbrouck-and-tindal-reading-fluency-norms. Readability metrics computed with Python (spaCy, textstat).