Despite obvious differences, the pressures and strategy involved in horse racing, remind me of some of the challenges students and teachers have while preparing a student for college. You could prepare a student for 6 to 8 weeks for a test, but just like with a horse on race day, you never know if that test preparation will pay off in the student’s final score. You can only prepare that student to the best of your (and their) abilities, cross your fingers and hope.

Fortunately for students who are in the college races, there is a way to help guide yourself across the finish line and into the college of your choice, even after the race is finished: Superscoring.

What is Superscoring? Why Superscore?

Some colleges allow students to superscore a student’s test results from tests that they’ve taken more than once. That means that if a student takes the SAT two times before applying to a college, they can submit both scores to the college and the college will take only the best scores from each section.

Let’s say a student “Johnny” studies for 6 to 8 weeks for the SAT and despite all that effort, really botches the critical reading section of their exam. His math scores are fantastic, however, which helps pull up his score, but not enough to stand a chance at the school of his choice. Tough luck, right? Well, maybe not. If “Johnny” takes the SAT again and does much better on the critical reading section, but his math score is still higher on his first test, he may be able to combine those results to create a Supertest score. It all depends on if the college he’s submitting his application toward superscores tests or not.

Superscoring is a Parachute not a Strategy

Here at Socrato we recommend that students looking to increase their college test scores work with a tutor to help diagnose if the ACT or the SAT is right for them. Using learning analytics, such as the analytics Socrato offers, tutors and students can now delve deeper into test results and identify strengths and weaknesses early on in the test preparation process so that students aren’t surprised on test day. We suggest taking on a test preparation regimen that focuses on 1 test (the ACT or SAT) for 6 to 8 weeks.

Superscoring should not be used as a strategy. Instead it should be used as a parachute in the event of a test-taking emergency. No student should strive to superscore their test results. However, in the event that the student performs under expectation in a certain area of a test, superscoring can be extremely helpful to give that student the leg-up that they need.

Before You Superscore, Read This

Ross Blankenship of Top Test Prep recently wrote a very helpful post on his blog called “Superscoring –3 Points to Consider.” I agree with Ross when he says that superscoring is a great band-aid for students who got sick before the test or had a bad night, but probably won’t help individuals who are already struggling to keep up with school work.

Also, not all colleges allow superscoring. Before retaking the SAT or ACT with the intent to superscore results, it’s important that a student look into the colleges they want to apply to and see what their policy is on superscoring. If the college prefers to accept only 1 uncombined score from 1 test, than it’s not likely that taking another test will be worth the preparation, money and time. Afterall, if the student is unwilling to work at improving the second score or if they have multiple demands at school which would be sacrificed for the sake of the second round of the test preparation process, I would strongly advise against Superscoring for the student.

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featured photo is from *raymond

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SAT PREP BOOKS

1. The Official SAT Study Guide – Version 2 book with 10 Tests (this is current version)

• Publisher: College Board; 2 Stg edition (July 21, 2009)
• Paperback: 997 pages
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874478529
• ISBN-13: 978-0874478525
• Link: The Official SAT Study Guide 2nd Edition on Amazon.com

2. The Official SAT Study Guide – Version 1 Book with 8 Tests

• Publisher: College Board; 4th edition (October 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874477182
• ISBN-13: 978-0874477184
• Link: The Official SAT Study Guide Version 1 on Amazon.com

To see the difference between the above two SAT prep books read our article comparing the SAT version 1 and SAT version 2 books.

ACT PREP BOOKS

3. The Real ACT Prep Guide – with 3 Real ACT Tests

• Publisher: Peterson’s; 2 edition (December 3, 2007)
• Paperback: 623 pages
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0768926750
• ISBN-13: 978-0768926750
• Link: The Real ACT Prep Guide on Amazon.com

There are definitely books by other publishers out there. As a student or a tutor what book do you prefer for practicing or tutoring the SAT and ACT? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Free ACT and SAT Diagnostic Tests: Grade Your Yourself with Our New BubbleSheet Grader Tool
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How have you (or your student) really done on SAT or ACT test prep? Do you know exactly what to focus on before next mock practice test?

We are please to invite you to try theTestGrader, where you can grade, score and get detailed personalized reports for ACT / SAT full tests or individual section reports. In few clicks convert your books / paper based test practice responses in scaled score, points lost by subject area, and detailed performance analysis.

Some time back we created the free ACT test scoring and composite score calculation tool and has written number of article about ACT Scoring process. Continuing on our work, we have automated the full process for ACT and SAT scoring, grading, composite score calculation, and most importantly Point Lost analysis at theTestGrader.com.

Grade individual section and get same detailed analysis as full test. See the sample ACT test section report which is similar to full ACT or SAT report.

theTestGrader is currently supporting individual section reporting for 10 SAT tests from the latest book by CollegeBoard and 3 ACT tests from the Real ACT Prep guide.

It’s free during the beta phase. So, create reports for your student, or have your students generate their reports directly. The process is simple:

1. Go to http://www.thetestgrader.com and see the demo
2. Select appropriate exam, test #, and section
3. Transfer responses on online bubblesheet
4. Get score and download report in PDF format

While still in Beta, you may see issues. We hope theTestGrader will save time for tutors and students. If you have any suggestions, request for additional tests, or any other feedback, please reach out to us.

Some of the changes you might notice -

• In certain situation during Online Take Test (especially for ACT tests), the answer choices were not showing up properly, that issue has been resolved.
• While printing tests and bubblesheets from library, question content was not printed correctly. This issue was impacting ACT tests and questions with images. This issue has been fixed.

Additional SAT tests rolled out -

• We now offer Scoring and Performance Reporting for additional SAT tests and custom SAT tests. These tests are in addition to one which are available from the Official SAT Guide. Please drop us an email if you want access to these.

As always we try to do as much testing as possible. If you encounter any issue, please feel free to reach out to us.

Also, majority of time students practice individual sections of tests. Few full length tests are completed in one sitting.

Continuing on our work on ACT Score calculator and Performance analysis we are starting the alpha testing of “section reports” for ACT and SAT tests. See the final output sample ACT Test Section Report, and SAT Test Section Report. Now compare is with full length SAT / ACT test report.

We believe this will help students and tutors to eliminate some of the cumbersome work give them more insight and time to focus their effort on real learning.

Using new features, Students and tutors who are using regular ACT books will be able to enter their question responses in a simple bubble sheet like web page. The basic flow will be:

• Select the book, test and section
• Enter the responses on bubble sheet
• Enter your name (optionally login)
• Get the scoring and the performance report.

Below are few screen shots and flow chart of what is about to come live in next few weeks.

If you are interested in trying out the Alpha Service please send us an email via our contact form and we will send you instruction how to access it.

Socrato Team

UPDATE
Looking for easy grading, scoring, and reporting tool for ACT and SAT – Check out our post on theTestGrader where in few clicks you can grade, score, and get personalized report for individual sections of test.

• Ability to configure custom branding for Scoring and Performance Reports
  • Customers can now upload their logo, choose a color scheme, and create their own custom branded reports. This feature will be accessible to customers by request only.
• “Section Reports” (Mini Reports) for ACT and SAT tests
  • We incorporated a number of backend changes in the Scoring and Performance Reporting module. This will allow us to roll out “Mini Reports” in near future. Now, if a student practices only a single section of an ACT or SAT test, they can generate a “mini report” with the same level of detail and insight as our full report; we even provide a projected scaled score.
    • For example, an ACT test student can practice only the science section, and will be able to generate detailed scoring and performance analysis report for just that section. Stay tuned for more details on this in a future post, or contact us if you’d like to be an early adopter.
• Coming Soon: Additional tests for SAT and ACT
  • Soon we will be announcing support for released/retired ACT and SAT published tests (not in the books), as well as support for custom tests. Due to many customer requests, we’re attempting to support as many of the released SAT and ACT tests as we can. Let us know if you’re interested in being notified when these get released, or if there are specific test versions you’re seeking.

As always we have tested as much as possible, but there is always a possibility that you may encounter issues. If you see something that needs our attention please reach out to us.

Team Socrato

UPDATE
Looking for easy grading, scoring, and reporting tool for ACT and SAT – Check out our post on theTestGrader where in few clicks you can grade, score, and get personalized report for individual sections of test.

Not a huge release, number of minor fixes and enhancements in SAT/ACT custom diagnostic reports area.

• An issue related to the recalculation of the scores for SAT, ACT, and SAT/ACT comparison reports has been resolved. After uploading the session in bulk mode… if the user edits the session again online, the updated session was not scored correctly. The issue was introduced recently due to fixes to one of the custom reports.
• In order to do the billing we track the number of student sessions and the report generation activity. Many times due to user data entry error, or for other reasons, tutors needed to completely delete the session and reload data which recreated the new student session. Now the deleting of the session is tracked, so there is fully reconcilable audit trail of usage and billing.
• A few weeks back we discovered that during heavy load, the report usage activity was not getting tracked properly. No information was lost, but we needed to calculate the usage at the end of month, rather in real time. We have fixed the issue.
• Modified the ACT/SAT comparison test diagnostic report (this is applicable to custom tests) which now does the correlation of two scores (the SAT and ACT) and also makes the recommendation about what test to take.

Please let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions.

Students and tutors who use traditional books, paper / pencil to practice and prepare for the ACT exam can now get the best of two worlds. Work with traditional printed books like Real ACT Test Prep Guide to practice and fill out the bubble sheets on paper; and use Socrato’s ACT Diagnostic Assessment Service to create the best ACT diagnostic analysis.

After paper based practice, in a few clicks tutors or students can enter student test practice responses (bubble sheet data) into Socrato using one of our convenient data entry options: directly enter as bubble sheet (student or tutor), enter in bulk mode, or load files automatically generated via a bubble sheet scanner.

Once done, within seconds the Socrato online service does the grading, scaling, scoring and detailed analysis. This service takes our previous work on our Free ACT test analysis and scoring tool further. It removes all complexities of ACT test scoring, ACT composite score calculation etc. The automatically generated reports can be printed, emailed or viewed online. The ACT report is now on par with our highly regarded SAT diagnostic service.

The diagnostic analysis is one of the best. It covers:

• Full history of student progress, detailed grading, scoring, scaling, and even the point cost analysis in each subject area
• Skills, difficulty level, subject area content analysis, and question responses detail
• Socrato analysis goes “beyond scores” and analyzes student test taking tendencies and behavior

This analysis leads to personalized, concrete recommendations, and performance improvement in less time. You can download the sample diagnostic report for the ACT test for an Individual student here.

Tutors can look online or download detailed diagnostic reports for an individual student to help them one-on-one, or look at a class/group as a whole to optimize the strategy and instruction plan for the most optimal outcome. The entire process is very similar to Socrato’s SAT, MCAS, and other exam assessment offerings. To see how Socrato generates one of the best diagnostic assessments for the ACT, SAT and other tests see the video here.

By combining the best of two – paper / pencil for practice, and computers to do the analysis, Socrato saves time, improves student results, and allows tutors / students to focus effort on instruction and learning.

Socrato allows for branding of reports and customization of learning analytics to meet the specific needs and styles of our customers. If you are interested in learning more about this service please contact us.

UPDATE
Looking for easy grading, scoring, and reporting tool for ACT and SAT – Check out our post on theTestGrader where in few clicks you can grade, score, and get personalized report for individual sections of test.

• The most recent fiscal year revenue for CollegeBoard is $631 million. Net “excess” (profit) for the same year is $57 million.
• Heads of both organizations earned salaries above $500,000.

ACT financial numbers were not revealed. You can read the full article here.