Admission Testing Solutions: Early Childhood Testing Reimagined
From time to time, when I come across products that could be helpful to the world of enrollment, I’ll write about them here. This is not a paid review or an endorsement, just my own observations.
Recently, I learned about Admission Testing Solutions (ATS), which began in Dallas in response to a very practical challenge facing independent schools: how to assess young applicants in a way that was efficient, developmentally appropriate, and useful to admission teams. Its early growth was closely tied to the Dallas independent school community, where schools were looking for a shared, reliable way to gather academic readiness data for Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and 1st-grade applicants. When the pandemic disrupted traditional admission visits and in-person assessment practices, ATS became even more valuable because its web-based platform could be administered flexibly, including remotely when needed.
That origin story matters because ATS was not built as a generic testing product looking for a market. It emerged from a real need in independent schools admissions.
For many schools, early childhood admission assessment has long relied on observation, play-based interactions, teacher input, developmental checklists, or tools that focus largely on social-emotional readiness. Those are all important. In fact, no school should make admission decisions for very young children based only on a test score. But schools also need to understand something more specific: Where is this child academically right now? What has the child been exposed to? Is the child likely to be ready for the program the school offers? Are there patterns in readiness that may help with class placement, support, or communication with teachers?
That is the gap ATS seeks to fill.
The ATS assessments are designed for applicants to Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and 1st grade. The Pre-Kindergarten assessment includes two sections: Language Arts and Mathematics. The Kindergarten and 1st-grade assessments include four sections: Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, Early Literacy, and Mathematics. Together, these domains are intended to give admissions teams a fuller view of foundational early childhood skills while keeping the experience appropriate for young children.
One of the things that stands out about ATS is the simplicity of the user experience.
The assessment is web-based, so schools do not need to download an app or install specialized software. It can run on a laptop, desktop, Chromebook, tablet, or iPad with a stable internet connection and a current browser. ATS recommends an iPad or comparable touchscreen tablet for the youngest students because the touch interface is intuitive for children at this age. Students also use headphones because the assessment includes audio prompts.
That audio-guided structure is especially important. Young children are not expected to read directions independently. Questions are read aloud, and students can replay the prompt as many times as needed by selecting a red arrow on the screen. On the Pre-Kindergarten assessment, some answer choices can also be read aloud. Students cannot move forward without selecting an answer, and they must listen to the full question before choosing a response. The assessment does not tell students whether an answer is right or wrong, which helps prevent the experience from becoming a feedback loop that might heighten anxiety or alter behavior.
The assessments are also relatively brief. According to ATS, the Pre-Kindergarten assessment includes 48 items and typically takes about 15–20 minutes. The Kindergarten assessment includes 60 items and takes about 20–25 minutes. The 1st-grade assessment includes 72 items and generally takes about 30–45 minutes. Total session time, including login, directions, and wrap-up, usually falls within the 25–45-minute range.
For admission offices, the operational benefits may be as important as the assessment itself. Because students work individually on devices with headphones, multiple students can test simultaneously. A school could incorporate ATS into a larger admissions visit day, a rotating-station model, or a small-group testing session. The proctor’s role is not to administer every question orally or manually score the work afterward. Instead, the proctor helps students get started, follows a provided script, monitors the room, and observes how children interact with the task.
That observation can still be valuable. A child’s approach to the assessment may tell the school something about stamina, independence, frustration tolerance, focus, or problem-solving style. But ATS removes much of the manual burden that often falls on admissions teams: grading, scanning, interpreting paper-based materials, and deciding whether a response is close enough to count.
The score reports are delivered electronically through a secure school portal, typically within 24–48 business hours. Reports include scaled scores, percentile ranks, and section-by-section performance indicators. For schools, that means the assessment can provide both an individual snapshot of a child’s readiness and comparative data that may help admission teams look across an applicant pool.
Caroline Doswell, Executive Director of ATS, emphasized during our conversation that the product is designed to help schools balance social-emotional and academic readiness. That distinction is important. ATS is not positioning itself as a replacement for teacher observation, play-based visits, family conversations, or school-specific mission fit. Rather, it provides an additional source of data in an area where many schools have historically had limited or inconsistent information.
According to ATS, a psychometrician reviews the assessment data annually, including item performance, norming data, and reliability. In our conversation, Doswell shared that the assessment has a reliability rate of 0.91, which ATS describes as exceptionally strong. The company also reviews whether questions are too easy, too difficult, or not yielding useful information, and uses field questions to inform future improvements.
For schools considering a change to their early childhood admission process, ATS appears especially relevant in two kinds of settings:
The first is a highly selective school where small differences in readiness may matter because there are more qualified applicants than available seats. In those environments, admission committees often need more than impressions. They need reliable, comparable data to inform difficult decisions.
The second is a high-volume admission office with limited staffing. Many schools are asking small admissions teams to manage more inquiries, applications, communication, and events without adding personnel. A tool that reduces manual assessment work while producing usable data may be particularly helpful for lean teams.
There are, of course, important implementation questions. Schools will need to think carefully about how ATS fits into their existing process, how much weight the data should carry, how results will be communicated internally, and whether reports will be shared with parents. They will also need alignment between the admissions office and lower school leadership. As with any admissions tool, the value of ATS will depend not only on the assessment itself but also on how thoughtfully a school uses it.
ATS seems aware of that adoption challenge. The company offers onboarding support, proctor scripts, sample questions that schools can share with families, beta-testing opportunities with current students, and the opportunity for prospective partner schools to speak with current users. ATS also offers discounted baseline testing for schools that want to assess current students and establish a local comparison point before using the assessment in a live admission cycle.
For schools that are satisfied with their current early childhood process, ATS may not feel urgent. But for schools that sense their current process is too subjective, too labor-intensive, too difficult to compare across applicants, or too thin on academic readiness data, Admission Testing Solutions is worth exploring.
The strongest case for ATS is not that it makes admission decisions for schools. It does not, and it should not. The stronger case is that it provides admissions teams with another source of structured, developmentally appropriate information at an age when reliable data can be hard to gather.
And in a moment when schools are being asked to make more informed enrollment decisions, communicate value more clearly, and use staff time more efficiently, that kind of tool deserves attention.
