The HSPT was designed as a standardized test battery to assess the performance of students from any scholastic background. Private high schools found the HSPT to be a useful addition to their application and admissions processes, leading the HSPT to become a commonly-administered high school admissions examination in private schools.

The High School Placement Test is broken down into three categories. From subtests, three different skills are measured: Total Cognitive, Total Basic, and Composite skills. Total Cognitive Skills include subtest that deal with Verbal and Quantitative knowledge; Total Basic Skills has a reading, mathematics, and language subtests; and, lastly, Composite Skills are measured from Verbal, Quantitative, Reading, Mathematics, and Language subtests. There are 298 questions in total to be attempted in 2 hrs. 30 min