As usual I’ve been reading up on education news, trolling some blogs and participating in a bunch of twitter chats. Apart from a few stories, however the news was local and the twitter chats were with intimate, smaller groups. I really wanted to get a better idea about what are some of the major themes [...]
Students preparing for ACT or SAT tests and tutors who are helping students know how cumbersome it is to do scoring, scaling, and performance analysis on these tests (171 questions for SAT and 225 questions for ACT). Especially ACT is more painful as there are multiple level of scaling involved. See previous write up on [...]
This past weekend our team upgraded Socrato.com. Key changes included in this release: 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 [...]
Hello All, 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 [...]
Diane Ravitch an education historian makes an argument that tests like SAT and ACT are the common standards of education across all states. Read full article here
An interesting article in Fortune Magazine which gives insight into financials of CollegeBoard (a “non-profit” which owns the SAT and other exams) and American College Testing (which owns the ACT test). According to the article: The most recent fiscal year revenue for CollegeBoard is $631 million. Net “excess” (profit) for the same year is $57 [...]
“Socrato: The Future of Test Prep?” by Matt Fellows “Socrato has the potential to strip standardized tests of their mysterious, intimidating power, and turn them into more helpful learning tools…” Read More
UPDATE: There is an online version of this tool available for free at Bubblesheetgrader.com Tutors who teach ACT exam prep and Students who are preparing for the ACT exam, feel the pain of ACT test grading, scoring, and scaling. The process requires reasonable manual effort which is prone to error, and is time away from [...]
In addition to the many other methods of conducting test sessions or importing student responses, Socrato now allows tutors and teachers to directly initiate a test session as one of their students. The responses can be entered question by question, or in “bubble sheet” mode. For large classes, tutors can still import from excel files, [...]
On Wednesday, December 9th, at 6:30 Mass Innovation is organizing an event for MA innovators. A number of companies will present there. Thanks to everyone who voted for Socrato, we are one of the presenter. If you are at the event, look forward to see you later today. Here are the directions: http://massinnovationnights.com/event-rsvp/google-map
