<p>scores for SSAT Oct 2014 are out!</p>
<p>Scores are out! Analogies were my daughter’s hardest but the reading seemed easier than many practice tests.</p>
<p>The SSAT scores are out. Which scores do the schools look at the female scores or the overall scores. Please advise.</p>
<p>My daughter did not do well in Reading Comprehension. She got only 47 percentile. She has scored 94 percentile in math and 94 percentile in Verbal. Can anyone tell me if she stands a chance of admission to schools like Groton, Choate and St. Pauls.</p>
<p>@QueenCoke, my impression is that it’s somewhat unusual to see a kid with such a wide discrepancy between the verbal and reading comprehension scores. Usually those two scores would be in the same ballpark, as you don’t get a high score on verbal without being a kid who is a strong reader. I think schools don’t have too much of an issue with a kid who scores high on verbal/reading comp and much lower on math, or vice versa, because they know that some kids are science/math kids and some are language arts kids. But I would worry that this somewhat unusual combination of scores might be a bit of a red flag for top schools.
Did your daughter do much test prep in advance? It may be something as simple as her not understanding what the reading comprehension questions are getting at, and knowing some of the “tricks” that will help her get through those questions faster and with more confidence. If you can swing it, even a couple of hours of private tutoring might make a big difference in this case. A good tutor will have her do some practice tests, and then use those to hone in on the particular types of question or areas that are giving her the most trouble, and then focus on helping her with those issues.</p>
<p>Thank you Soxmom but my daughter is an international student. We tried very hard to get a tutor for her English Comprehension but were unsuccessful. She did do a lot of practice tests but those were only from the web and SSAT practice tests. The practice tests showed that she was fine. The SSAT test is also not held in the same city where we live and so it is very difficult for me to take her again to give it. But I am willing to do it but my daughter does not want to give it again. Wonder where I stand… it is so difficult to deal with these situations. </p>
<p>Many schools will overlook a somewhat low comprehension score from an international student if they have a strong TOEFL score.</p>
<p>Thank you for your reply Daykidmom but the problem with my daughter is she did do a part of her junior and middle school in North America, after which we had to move to Asia. She had sat for the SSAT before and was waitlisted in some schools. But they never asked for her TOEFL scores. </p>
<p>@soxmom, what is the standard for test prep? My DD did 2 full timed tests (one from a test prep book, one from the internet), and I am trying to get her to review some of her weak sections using a standard (Princeton Review, I think) SSAT/ISEE test prep book. Where do you learn these “some of the “tricks” that will help her get through those questions faster and with more confidence.” of which you write? What do you recommend? We are on deck for 15 Nov. Thanks! And a virtual box of chocolates for your (anticipated) kindness!</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any “standard” for it. I know kids who literally don’t do any preparation at all, to kids who have been going to tutors twice a week since last spring (overkill in my opinion). I think, though, that doing timed practice tests isn’t the most useful preparation. Yes, doing at least one is good to have a sense of what your child struggles with more than other parts. But doing more practice tests won’t help her get any better at what she doesn’t understand. All of the test prep books (except for the SSAT’s official guide) have some helpful suggestions on strategies that kids wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves.<br>
For instance, my daughter struggles with math and is pretty slow and methodical in her approach. What she didn’t realize is that you don’t necessarily need to solve the problem fully and then see if your answer is one of the five given. Instead, on many problem you can eyeball the answers and see right off that bat that a couple of them can’t possibly be right. Once you have it narrowed down to two or three possible answers, then you only need to solve enough of the problem to know which it is, rather than laboriously working through the whole thing. My older child is a more intuitive math student, so this was never an issue for him, as he just did this approach naturally, but my daughter needed to be coached on it.<br>
It’s also important for kids to understand when they should guess at an answer and when they shouldn’t, and to understand that, they need to know how the scoring works. You get one point for each correct answer, a quarter of a point taken off for each incorrect answer, and no points (but also no penalty) for leaving a question blank. So just as a pure statistical analysis, if you really have no idea what the answer is, you’re better off leaving it blank because you’re much more likely to end up with the penalty for a wrong answer than you are to get the point for a correct answer. But if you’ve got it narrowed down to two possibilities, then guessing’s not a terrible idea because you have a 50-50 chance that you’ll get an extra point.
The best advice I can give you is to use the practice tests to hone in on what your child needs to improve at. Kids have a tendency to want to “practice” the stuff that they’re already good at, and avoid the thing that are harder for them. Once you know what they really need to work on, you can also go to the library or a bookstore and look at other test prep books to see what they suggest as ways to improve on that aspect of the test. That way you don’t need to buy a lot of different books, just see what they offer as strategies and then work with your daughter yourself on understanding those strategies.
Hope this helps.</p>