EQAO Practice Tests 2026-27: Grades 3, 6, 9 and 10 in One Place

The four practice sets, and what is in each one

Each set below was written for this site. None reprints an EQAO question. Start with the one that matches your child's grade and ignore the rest.

Grade 3

Eighteen questions in the format the real assessment uses: five reading, three writing and ten maths. Every answer is explained for you rather than for your child, so you can see what the question was testing before you sit down together.

Grade 6

Twenty-two questions, five reading, three writing and fourteen maths. Same shape as the Grade 3 set, with more of the weight on maths, which mirrors where Grade 6 students most often lose marks.

Grade 9

Twenty maths questions spread across the five content strands of MTH1W, the de-streamed Grade 9 maths course. The answer key works through each one by strand, so a wrong answer points at a topic rather than at a score.

Grade 10

Twenty OSSLT questions in the four reading formats the real test uses, plus an original open-response writing task. EQAO's four reading formats are a real-life narrative, an information paragraph, a news report and a dialogue. The four reading selections and the questions are original. That page notes one exception: its writing-task instruction line follows EQAO's own wording, because practising against a paraphrase of the instruction is not practising.

If your child is in Grade 10 and you want the test explained before you practise anything, the OSSLT explained covers what it asks and what the result means.

EQAO's own sample tests, and what each one actually gives you

These are free, they run in a browser, and they are the closest thing to the real interface your child will meet. Sitting one is worth more than any amount of reading about the test, because the interface is part of the difficulty.

• Grade 3 sample test. Two language sessions holding 10 or 11 questions between them, and two maths stages holding 22. At the end of each session or stage your child sees every question, their answer and the correct response.
• Grade 6 sample test. Same structure as the Grade 3 one, at the Junior Division level.
• Grade 9 maths sample test. One session with two stages, 27 questions. The real assessment is twice that.
• OSSLT practice test. Two sessions with selected-response questions and two open-response questions, equivalent to the sessions on the real test.

EQAO also publishes sets of released questions from past assessments. Those exist for mathematics only, and only at Grades 3, 6 and 9. The Primary Division sets are dated November 2025, January 2025 and November 2023, and Grade 9 has its own sets for 2025, 2024 and 2023.

There is no released question set for reading or for writing, at any grade. If your child's difficulty is reading comprehension or the writing task, the official archive has nothing for you, and that is worth knowing before you spend an evening looking for it.

EQAO also publishes alternative versions of the sample and practice tests themselves, in formats including large print and contracted or uncontracted Braille. A school administrator can request one through EQAO's e-assessment system, roughly three weeks before the administration, or by email outside that window. Read that as the sample test rather than the assessment your child sits.

Links to all of these sit on EQAO's four assessment pages, listed in the sources at the foot of this page.

What most EQAO advice gets wrong

Search "eqao practice test" from Canada today and the first page of Google gives you four pages of EQAO's own site, two practice-test companies, an interactive quiz on a third-party maths site with no readable text around it, the Toronto District School Board's resources page, and one teacher's personal blog. Checked 17 September 2026.

Three things that page never tells you.

One of those top results is not for children. EQAO's Math Proficiency Test page ranks high on this search. The MPT is a certification requirement for people training to become teachers. It has nothing to do with your child, and it is an easy click to make by mistake.

The Grade 9 maths assessment adapts as your child works. It uses a multi-stage adaptive model, which means the questions shift according to how the previous stage went. A student who notices the questions getting harder is usually doing well. Nobody tells students this, and a child who reads rising difficulty as failure loses marks to panic rather than to maths. Say it out loud before the test. It costs nothing.

The OSSLT does not adapt. It uses a linear design, so every student sees the same questions in the same order. The result is a scale score between 200 and 400, and 300 is the minimum for a successful outcome.

One more, and it is EQAO's own page rather than anyone's advice. The Grade 9 mathematics page carries a paragraph describing an alternative sample test with "two sessions for the language component". The Grade 9 Assessment of Mathematics has no language component. It is template text left unedited. If you read it and got confused, the confusion was not yours.

The change that lands this year: Grade 9 maths now counts for 20 per cent

This is the one genuine policy change in the 2026-27 school year, and it is the fact most pages on this topic have not caught up with.

EQAO's own page says the result is to be included in the student's final course mark, without giving a figure. The figure is in the Ministry of Education's diploma-requirements policy, at section 6.1.8. For 2025-26 the assessment had to be weighted at a minimum of 10 per cent and a maximum of 30 per cent. From the 2026-27 school year, the weighting is fixed at 20 per cent of the final mark.

So the answer to "how much does this count for" is no longer "ask the school". For every student enrolled in MTH1W who writes the assessment, it is 20 per cent, province-wide, for the year your child is in now.

That matters for how you treat the two windows. A Grade 9 student sitting the assessment in the January window is being marked on a course they are partway through. A student sitting it in June has finished the course. Same 20 per cent either way.

What the levels mean, and where a pass actually exists

Grades 3, 6 and 9 results come back as a level from 1 to 4, or as Below Level 1. The Ministry of Education defines Level 3 as the provincial standard.

• Level 4 means the knowledge and skills were demonstrated with a high degree of effectiveness. Achievement surpasses the provincial standard.
• Level 3 means considerable effectiveness. Achievement is at the provincial standard.
• Level 2 means some effectiveness. Achievement is approaching the provincial standard.
• Level 1 means limited effectiveness. Achievement falls much below the provincial standard.
• Below Level 1 means the student has not demonstrated sufficient achievement of the curriculum expectations. It is a real category on the report rather than an error, and it is the one result worth a conversation with the teacher.

For Grades 3 and 6, EQAO states plainly that the provincial standard is not used to decide whether a student passes or fails, and that these results are not included in the grades that appear on a report card. There is no pass mark. A Level 2 is not a fail, and it is not a reason to sit a nine-year-old down for a serious conversation.

Two more things about the Grade 3 and Grade 6 results that change how much weight to give them. The individual report reaches families by the end of September 2027, which is after your child has started the next grade. And the assessment is a snapshot of one set of sessions, not a placement decision.

Grade 9 works differently, and this is the part the "no pass mark" line gets wrong when it is repeated for every grade. There is still no pass or fail on the assessment itself, but EQAO attaches a percentage band to each level for Grade 9: Level 4 is 80 to 100 per cent, Level 3 is 70 to 79, Level 2 is 60 to 69, Level 1 is 50 to 59, and EQAO lists no percentage band for Below Level 1. At 20 per cent of the course mark, a low result can move whether your child earns the MTH1W credit. So in Grade 9 the result does not fail your child by itself, and it is not weightless either.

The OSSLT is the only one of the four with a pass. Passing it is one of the requirements for the Ontario Secondary School Diploma.

What if your child needs accommodations, or cannot sit it at all

Three provisions exist, they are written into Ministry policy, and none of them is on the schedule the school sends home.

Accommodations. For the OSSLT, Ministry policy is explicit: the accommodations specified in a student's Individual Education Plan must be available on the day or days of the test. For the other three, EQAO reports students who received accommodations according to their plan, and the school administration is who you discuss them with. Raise it with the school before the window opens rather than during it. English language learners may also be entitled to special provisions on the OSSLT, listed separately in the same policy.

Deferral of the OSSLT. A principal can postpone the OSSLT to a later administration for a student working towards a diploma. Ministry policy lists who may be eligible: a student with an IEP who could not take the test even with every accommodation provided; an English language learner who has not yet acquired enough proficiency in English to take it; a student who has not successfully acquired reading and writing skills appropriate to Grade 9; a student unable to write at the scheduled time because of illness, injury or other extenuating circumstances; and a student new to the school who cannot be given the appropriate accommodations in time. Documentation goes to the principal in every case.

Exemption. A student whose Individual Education Plan indicates they are not working towards an Ontario Secondary School Diploma may, with parental consent and the principal's approval, be exempted from writing the OSSLT or taking the literacy course.

Grade 9 maths is the exception on the last two only. Ministry policy allows no deferrals and no exemptions for a student enrolled in MTH1W. Accommodations still apply.

What happens if your child does not pass the OSSLT

Not passing on the first attempt is not the end of the matter, and the route out is written into Ministry policy rather than left to the school.

Once a student has had two opportunities to sit the OSSLT and has a result of "not yet successful" at least once, they become eligible to enrol in the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Course, the OSSLC. Completing the OSSLC satisfies the literacy requirement for the diploma.

A principal can allow a student into the OSSLC before the second attempt, where the principal judges that to be in the student's best educational interest. Mature students may enrol in the OSSLC directly.

Two windows run each year, which is why "two opportunities" is a realistic timeline rather than a two-year wait. Ministry policy says a student may attempt the OSSLT in the fall or the spring session, or in both if they were not yet successful on the previous attempt. The fall 2026 window closes on 30 November 2026, with results by the end of January 2027. The spring window runs 30 March to 19 April 2027, with results by the end of May.

There is a third route, and it is the one most parents have never heard of. Ministry policy names adjudication alongside the test and the literacy course. A school board may set up an adjudication panel at the end of the school year to give a student one more opportunity to meet the graduation requirement, where the student was never able to complete it because of illness, injury or other circumstances. Note the word may: unlike the literacy course, adjudication is something a board chooses to run, so ask your board whether it does. Private schools and First Nation or federally operated schools cannot offer it for literacy and use the literacy course instead. Ministry policy says more detail on the adjudication process will be shared in advance of the 2026-27 school year, so that document does not set out the mechanics.

Where you can get help for free

Three things, all free, all checked on 17 September 2026. The first is an entitlement rather than a resource.

Remedial assistance from your school board. Ministry policy is not optional on this point: school boards must provide remedial assistance for students who do not complete the OSSLT successfully. It is designed to improve the student's skills before they retake the test. Ask the school what theirs looks like, because it is an obligation and not a favour.

TVO Learn Mathify. Free one-to-one online maths help for Ontario students in Grades 4 to 12, delivered by Ontario Certified Teachers. It is free to use with no advertising, and all it needs is an Ontario Education Number to create an account. Hours are 9am ET to 9pm ET, Monday to Friday, and 3pm ET to 9pm ET on Saturdays and Sundays. It is maths only. TVO Learn, the wider site it belongs to, carries free material in other subjects.

The Toronto District School Board's EQAO maths resources. Published openly on the board's own site. Per grade it lists weekly practice questions with an answer key, an archive of past questions, a maths glossary, a formula sheet for Grades 6 and 9, and a practice package built for parents and caregivers.

Mathify and the TDSB package are maths only, so neither covers reading or writing practice at any grade, and Mathify does not take students below Grade 4. For a Grade 3 parent that leaves EQAO's own sample test, the TDSB package and the practice set on this site.

Why our questions are original, and why that is not a style choice

Every EQAO page carries the King's Printer for Ontario copyright line. The King's Printer's own terms say that Crown material may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes if credit is given, copyright is acknowledged and no changes are made to the content, and that reproduction for commercial purposes may only happen under a licence from the King's Printer.

Genie is a paid service, so rather than work out where the line sits, every question on the four practice pages is written from scratch in the format the real assessment uses, and the official sample tests are linked rather than copied.

There is a second reason, separate from copyright. EQAO does not release individual completed assessments or student responses, because the questions are kept for use in future assessments. Even its released sets are described as adapted questions serving as examples rather than as the papers students sat. So when a site offers "real EQAO questions", they are either those labelled released sets, which are maths only, or somebody's reconstruction. Worth checking which.

Where Genie fits

Genie works only with Canadian Certified Teachers, licensed by a provincial governing body such as the Ontario College of Teachers. Certification is verified before a teacher ever sees a student profile: the certificate number and issuing body are checked against the provincial registry, with a live government-ID match.

A raw score tells you how one sitting went. Which part went wrong is a different question: reading the question, the arithmetic underneath it, or the clock. Those three need different work, and telling them apart is the part a subject teacher does with a practice set.

A certified teacher also does more than the coursework in front of them. In Grade 9 and up they can chart which courses a student needs for a particular path later, then aim the teaching at the areas that get them there. Parents get a per-lesson record of what was covered and what the child understood.