Systems and methods provide educational adaptive diagnostic assessment of student performance by: a. receiving one or more parameters for an assessment and one or more sets of test questions for a sub-test; b. selecting a set of test questions from the sub-test; c. presenting the selected set of test questions to the student and collecting responses thereto; d. generating a score for the responses to a completed set; e. applying the score to select either the current set of questions or a new set of test questions; and f. repeating (c)-(e) for the subtest; and g. using a final score for the sub-test to select a new set of questions in a subsequent sub-test.