SharkTutorCT

According to Stanford U’s PhD researcher Patricia Chen, incorporating the study “hacks” of metacognition and self-regulation can easily bring a B-student into the A grades 1

Imagine what these tools can do for test prep!

Metacognition refers to students’ thinking about HOW they are going to study, WHAT resources, WHAT tools, and HOW to prioritize and organize t...

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 Tip #1 –

Plan to take the April ACT during junior year, and plan to make this at least your student’s second or third test. Why? The April test appears to be a favorable test based on my student history because

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Nicole Oringer, Partner and College Counselor of Ivy Education Services, recently alerted us to inappropriate requests at test sites in NJ during the Feb ACT administration to have students clear their calculators of RAM memory. 1

This request clearly goes against existing policy of the ACT:  

Typically, the ACT has been upfront about changes to its test format and content. For example, the ACT test-maker wrote White papers announcing changes to its Reading section whereby it planned to introduce a Paired Passage (started in June 2014) and totally change the ACT essay to incorporate an analysis of three different provided perspectives on an issue. The Essay has changed in scoring twice – from the original 0-12 scale to a 0-36 scale and back to a 0-12 scale....

Why take the SAT in March?

Well, just as in taking a standardized test, we’re going to examine the month of March in light of the other possible answers. And our goal is to eliminate those that make the least sense.

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October 1, 2016 – Great...

College Board is Deliberately Misleading the Public with National Percentiles –

PSAT Scores PSAT Scores were released on December 12, 2016. Many students were delighted when they saw their scores and National Percentiles. Did you know that College Board’s “National Percentiles” are based on a fabricated population of students who are in high school and include those who never take the SAT? Did you k...

Here it is -- the final day of 2016!  

I am so grateful for having had the opportunity to work with so many wonderful students and their families in their testing journeys as one key part of the college application process.  I have witnessed such growth in self-confidence through our journeys.  Some families have benefited from receiving merit scholarship awards or acceptance into honor programs or other benefits from their...

Many of the retail prep books and SAT Essay books are written with recommendations that assume that every SAT persuasive article presented in a prompt will be well written and that a student need only find the appropriate tools of reasoning, evidence, and stylistic elements to praise.

I disagree.

In case you missed the ACT Continuous Improvement latest series of announced changes to ACT reporting, I’m writing to let you know that you will be ecstatic to learn of this change, particularly with all of the grumbling and articles complaining about the 2015 move to report Essays on a 1-36 scale.

So, let’s say you scored a 25 Essay on your December, 2015 ACT, even though you had a 34 Composite. Let’s say that this 25 essay was comprised of three 8 sub-...