We launched the unique “Quiz a Day” for SAT and ACT students – register for free, come every day and solve a new quiz building yourself up for the gruelling challenge of a real SAT and/or ACT.

Tackling some of the common questions about “Quiz a Day” that I come across:

But isn’t there enough material on SAT and ACT already?

Yes and no. There is material but most of it is in the form of bulky text/guide books. Internet as a delivery medium has not yet been fully exploited for SAT and ACT practice content delivery. Also, good practice content comes at heavy price tags and most of the free stuff essentially doesn’t really say anything.

Even a preliminary round of googling around will demonstrate that good online practice material for SAT and ACT is much more difficult to find than we possibly imagine.

What’s with a new quiz every day?

The idea is to provide consistent practice over a period of time. This, coupled with systemic reinforcement of struggle areas is the only real method to build competency. Quiz a Day takes care of the first part – once the weaknesses are known, in most cases, a review the particular topics from the school curriculum suffices. It puts the control back to the learner and with control comes the responsibility. It’s not spoonfeeding a set of techniques and tricks to get a particular type of problems solved.

How is it different?

Standardized tests put a huge amount of stress on kids, ask any high-schooler or his/her parents. Our kids are continuously bombarded by messages highlighting the need for a great score and how a particular course or book or program is their ticket to academic nirvana. All this conditioning creates an artificial awe and fear of the tests and the preparation becomes a gruelling task.

Quiz a Day seeks to give them consistent practice in a fun way sans the unnecessary overload. The imperative is to think ahead, start working while there is still time and give some time every day to the test prep without really going overboard and building unbearable stress loads.

Are the questions of the same pattern and standard as the tests?

Absolutely. That is a pre-requisite for any test prep program to be successful. All the questions are carefully created to reflect the testing philosophy, standards and competency level of the respective tests.

How do you tackle various sections of the tests and various question types?

The “Quiz a Day” provides a proper mix of the question types and sections carefully designed with the actual tests in mind. followed over a period of time, it will give proportionate practice in all the sections and sub-sections covered in the actual tests.

But are there any free lunches?

No, but there can be free drinks thrown in with the paid lunch package, and to take it a step further, you can offer free drinks to people who just pass by to get them to the restaurant.

But how can you offer premium content for free?

The location of our Content Development hub in India gives us a strategic advantage enabling us to provide top quality content with a cost advantage. If creative allocation of our resources helps us provide premium value to our customer base and build a connect with them, good, and if we can reduce their entry load, even better.

What’s the roadmap?

More features and power to “Quiz a Day”. Let me emphasize, it is still evolving and will be a much more potent test prep tool in the months to come.

An innovative offering from eTutelage is in the final stages of development. This new service is designed to be an enormously useful tool for students preparing for ACT and SAT. The beta version will be out soon.

Watch this space for more updates!!!

Let’s do a quick recap – map out the skills/knowledge attributes tested in the ACT/SAT, determine what proficiency levels lead to what scores, determine what interventions are most effective for a given skill gap in a given attribute, determine the student’s target score, determine his current proficiency levels in all the attributes, determine target proficiency levels (derived from target scores), determine the skill gap and finally determine the required interventions.

A caveat, however, is that this process will not be completely analytical and mathematically deterministic. A lot of “understanding” of the the student’s learning style, goals and objectives and personality will come in play and hence the role of “academic thinking” cannot be neglected in the favor of pure analysis.

After the intervention steps are determined and the delivery of the same starts, it is very important to periodically gauge the effectiveness of each of them and the actual improvement that is happening. The findings will help in mid way course correction, if required, as well as help in making the complete mapping process more robust. In a sense, this engine will be a dynamic set of activities which will “learn” from itself as it is applied to more and more students.

Thus, the perfect test prep engine has to be a dynamic combination of cold analysis, warm understanding and an ability of the engine itself to imbibe learnings from its experiences and make itself stronger in terms of determining the right set of interventions which will lead to the desired score improvement with minimum expenditure in terms of time, money and teacher/student effort.

This engine is, as of today, a theoretical concept – but it is doable. the benefits are so immense it justifies investment in such an idea. It is powerful as it combines the best in analytics with the human side of teaching and makes the system self-improving.

Concluded.

Next comes the question of interventions.

Generic interventions in the form of standard text books lose their relevance as soon as we talk of student level customization. Also, the nature of intervention whether it is instruction or instructor led practice or focussed on test taking skills, whether hard or soft becomes important for obvious reasons. The key is finding a) the right mix of types of intervention, and, b) determining what those interventions are.

Preparation deficiencies amongst the students can be clubbed in the following categories:

• Knowledge deficiency – This could include one or more of lack of understanding of concepts, lack of pre-requisite knowledge, improper understanding of interlinkages between concepts, lack of understanding of application
• Skill deficiency – This could include inadequate reading and comprehension skills, lack of analytical ability, lack of critical reasoning skills, lack of data cognition and understanding skills, lack of composition skills etc.

In an ideal scenario, we should map out all the atomic level skills and knowledge areas relevant to the test and measure the student’s score in all of them. Also, the required skill and knowledge level (corresponding to the target score) being known, the picture will be much clearer in terms of skill gap. Skill gap score for each attribute will dictate the specific type of intervention and the activities to be included in it.

Ideally, determining the intervention will not be the third step in developing such an engine, though it comes sequentially as the third step. Mapping the intervention to the skill gap will in-fact proceed soon after the required attribute map is done.

For each knowledge or skill attribute, experts will need to determine what nature of interventions and what intervention activities should be used for every level of skill gap. That’s important because a skill gap of 4 on an attribute might warrant a completely different intervention vis-a-vis a skill gap of 14 on the same attribute.

Thus, during the development phase itself, we need to have a menu of interventions corresponding to each possible skill gap score on all the attributes. What specific intervention gets chosen from those in the menu will also depend upon the behavioral map of the student.

Once such a mapping of intervention activities with the skill gap scores is known, the task is a simple selection of relevant intervention activities.

This brings us to the third most important pillar of the perfect test program viz feedback and mid-way course correction.

(Continued in part 4)

The first part of the post laid out some of the skills/knowledge areas the standardized tests seek to test the student on.

Also, a logical base was built for the argument that the target perfect score for every student would vary.

The Perfect Test Prep thus starts with a unique perfect target score for a student.

The next target for the PTP has to be to determine where the student stands at the start of the program. For this, a smart assessment has to be devised which essentially goes about this skill-gap assessment in two steps: Step 1 is to map various knowledge/skill/attitude attributes tested in the SAT and ACT to the corresponding scores. This task becomes inherently complicated because:

a) Construction of a mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive list of attributes tested in standardized tests is a non trivial job – more so because it is difficult to agree upon an exhaustive list of attributes tested and because these attributes are frequently interlinked with each other. Another point to remember is that it may not always be possible to divide the set of attributes in mutually exclusive categories, in such cases, it is important to at least clearly mark out the interlinkages.

b) The second part of this task is to map the attributes to the scores they fetch. This is complex because different combinations of attributes could bring the same score and it is important to determine the difference, a change in each attribute would cause in the scores obtained, keeping all else constant (more like partial differentiation)

Step 2 is more standardized, once attributes are marked out, methods can be determined to assess the candidates level of proficiency on each of those.

The skill assessment (Step 2 above) will also reveal the pattern of attribute configuration (i.e. whether the student is naturally inclined to do well in math or english). Next, keeping the attribute configuration same, one can arrive at the required proficiency level in each of the attributes corresponding to the student’s attribute map (Thus, Jack and Jill, with Jack more mathematical and Jill, more “English types” gunning for the same score will arrive at different target proficiency levels on each attributes corresponding to their respective attribute configuration).

Once skill gaps are mapped, the subsequent task is to determine the set of interventions which would enhance the attribute proficiency scores to the desired levels.

Continued in part 3.