North Star
    Contests
    Gifted & Cognitive Test Prep
    Halton · Toronto · York Region · Durham

    CCAT-7 Practice for Ontario Students

    Twenty questions. One report. Find out where your child's reasoning actually stands — free.

    Your child writes the CCAT-7 this year. You've been told it measures thinking rather than knowledge, which is true — and also means there's no textbook to open. So start with the only question worth answering first: how does your child handle these question types right now?

    A child at a laptop at the kitchen table in warm evening light
    Verbal · Quantitative · Nonverbal reasoning practice

    20 free questions for your board

    Matched to Grade 3 or 4 and your school board. Plus a report showing where the reasoning broke.

    No card. Takes about 15 minutes.

    Screen capture: a question being answered, then the explanation

    How it works

    Tell us the board and grade

    Takes 30 seconds, no card.

    Your child answers 20 questions

    About 15 minutes, timed like the real test.

    You get the gap report

    Tonight, not after a scheduled call.

    Decide from there

    The full pack is $59 if you want it, and nothing happens if you don't.

    Who we are

    North Star Contests is a registered Canadian not-for-profit. We run math contests and daily reasoning practice for students in Grades 1–8, all year — gifted screening prep is one part of that. We write our own questions.

    What the CCAT-7 actually measures

    Verbal reasoning

    Verbal analogies · Verbal classification · Sentence completion

    Each asks your child to spot the relationship or rule connecting a set of words.

    Quantitative reasoning

    Number analogies · Number series · Equation building

    Each asks your child to find the numeric relationship or missing operation in a short sequence.

    Nonverbal reasoning

    Figure matrices · Figure classification · Paper folding

    Each asks your child to spot a visual rule and apply it to a new figure.

    The grade varies by board: Halton administers the CCAT-7 in Grade 4, while Toronto and York Region administer it in Grade 3. Durham runs a nomination-based process rather than universal screening. Wherever your board sits, it's administered at school, online, and results are filed in the student record. Families may opt out by contacting their school.

    What your child will see

    Select a grade.

    Boards & timing

    Toronto (TDSB) and York Region (YRDSB) test at Grade 3, typically in the fall.

    Question types

    All three CCAT-7 batteries appear: verbal, quantitative and nonverbal reasoning.

    What tends to be hardest

    Quantitative reasoning tends to be hardest at this age — Grade 3 students are still building the number fluency the number-series and equation-building questions assume.

    What a question looks like

    Original questions written by us — never reproduced from any published test.

    Verbal reasoning · Verbal analogy

    Bird is to nest as bee is to ____?

    A. HiveB. FlowerC. HoneyD. Wing

    Answer: A. Hive

    The relationship is "lives in" — a bird lives in a nest, a bee lives in a hive. The distractors (flower, honey, wing) are all bee-related words, but none complete the same relationship as the first pair.

    Nonverbal reasoning · Figure matrix

    Which figure completes the pattern?

    ?

    Answer: a square rotated 120°, roughly 8px across.

    Each row rotates the shape a fixed amount moving right, and each column shrinks the shape moving down. The missing figure continues both patterns at once — the reasoning skill is holding two rules in mind together, not recognizing either one alone.

    20 free questions for your board

    Matched to Grade 3 or 4 and your school board. Plus a report showing where the reasoning broke.

    No card. Takes about 15 minutes.

    You don't need five thousand questions tonight

    Other programs

    The whole library

    5,000 questions, all at once

    ≈ you decide where to start

    North Star

    The next 20

    custom picked for your child from ~2,000

    ≈ 20 minutes a day

    Other programs hand you a library — thousands of practice questions, worksheets, games, hours of video — and leave you to work out where to start. Your child has a few weeks and a bedtime.

    We have close to 2,000 questions too. Your child just never sees them all at once. Each session serves a short set of one question type, chosen for their grade and board, and the next set adjusts to how the last one went. Small doses, no wall of questions, no fatigue.

    When your child gets one wrong, there's an explanation right there — so the evening ends with something learned instead of a parent who also doesn't know why the answer was C.

    Start with twenty, free, and see where the gaps are before deciding whether you need the rest.

    What you get back

    After the twenty questions, you get a report — not a score. It shows which question types your child moved through easily, which ones slowed them down, and where the reasoning came apart. Timing included, because pacing is most of the difficulty.

    Reasoning report — sample

    Verbal reasoningStrongavg 18s
    Quantitative reasoningSloweravg 34s
    Nonverbal reasoningBroke downavg 51s
    Observation: Figure matrices with two rules at once are where the difficulty starts.
    A parent and child looking at the report together

    It's the thing most parents actually want and can't get anywhere else: a clear picture of how their child thinks, before test day decides it for them.

    Does preparation help?

    You may have been told there's nothing to study for the CCAT-7. That's true about content. There is nothing to memorise — no vocabulary list, no formula sheet — and any program promising to raise your child's score is overpromising.

    Familiarity is a different thing. A child who has never seen a figure matrix under time pressure spends the first minutes working out what is being asked. A child who has seen the format spends those minutes answering. Neither child reasons better than the other. One is simply less surprised.

    That is all we offer, and we think it is the honest version of what a parent can reasonably do.

    Why a worksheet won't show you what you need to know

    You see where the reasoning breaks, not just what was wrong

    A PDF tells you the answer was incorrect. The platform shows which step the thinking came apart on.

    Adaptive, not repetitive

    Questions adjust to what your child already handles, so time goes to the question types that are genuinely unfamiliar.

    Timed the way the real thing is

    Pacing is most of the difficulty. Practice on paper, with a parent nearby and no clock, doesn't rehearse the actual conditions.

    Free to start — twenty questions, then decide

    No commitment up front. See the report before deciding whether the full pack is worth it.

    Try a sample question

    A short adaptive set, the same format your child will see in the full pack.

    Interactive reasoning sample — component to be embedded.

    What's included

    Everything is matched to your board and your child's grade. Nothing here is a generic North American test-prep library.

    Board-matched question sets

    Questions selected for Halton, Toronto, York Region or Durham — not a generic set stretched across every test in North America.

    Adaptive question selection

    The platform reads what your child already handles and spends their time on the question types that are genuinely unfamiliar.

    Gap report for parents

    After every session: which question types were solid, which slowed them down, where the reasoning came apart. Timing included.

    Step-by-step explanations

    Every question has a worked explanation — so when your child gets one wrong at 8pm, the evening ends with something learned.

    Printable question sets

    Prefer paper? Every set can be printed, so practice doesn't have to mean more screen time.

    Timed practice

    Sessions run under the same time pressure as the real test, because pacing is most of the difficulty.

    One purchase, every child

    The full pack covers every child in your family — not per-student pricing.

    What it costs

    Most CCAT programmes won't tell you until you book a call. Here's ours.

    Free

    $0

    ✓ 20 questions matched to your board and grade

    ✓ A gap report showing where the reasoning held and where it didn't

    ✓ No card, no call, no scheduling

    Full Test Prep Pack

    $59 CAD one-time

    ✓ Close to 2,000 questions, served a short set at a time

    ✓ Three months of access, timed to your testing window

    ✓ Step-by-step explanations on every question

    ✓ Every child in your family included

    ✓ No subscription, no renewal

    That's the whole price. There's no upsell, no per-child fee and nothing to cancel.

    Frequently asked questions

    The CCAT-7 (CogAT) is a cognitive screening test used by several Ontario boards to help identify students who may benefit from gifted programming. It measures reasoning across three batteries — verbal, quantitative and nonverbal — rather than curriculum knowledge.

    20 free questions for your board

    Matched to Grade 3 or 4 and your school board. Plus a report showing where the reasoning broke.

    No card. Takes about 15 minutes.

    North Star Contests is an independent not-for-profit and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any school board or test publisher. NGAT, CCAT and all other test names are trademarks of their respective owners.

    © 2026 North Star Contests. northstartests.com