Group and individual informal reading inventories have brought about considerable improvement over standardized reading tests in the placement of students at their proper reading levels. Parents and school administrators want more individualization, however, so a comparatively effective, but quicker, test is needed. A combination of "cloze" sentences and a basic sight vocabulary list was used to construct just such a test. Exact readability levels were established for each grade level, and the sentence length and number of higher grade level words were also carefully controlled for each selection. Correlation with a graded informal reading inventory was quite high, while comparison with several well-known oral reading placement tests points up the test's usefulness in effecting a more careful placement of the pupils at a level where they can function in independent comprehension work; and the testing of 20 to 25 students consumes about one and one-half hours, compared with 10 to 20 hours normally required in testing a class. (Author/RB)