#ssat prep

In the classic movie Bull Durham, Kevin Costner walks along dark street at night and stops underneath a streetlight.  A gift wrap tube is sticking out of the nearby garbage can.  Costner picks up the tube and practices his swing while finding his reflection in a window.  This scene brilliantly captures what every master-of-their-craft knows – the skills for success must be practiced regularly and remain on the proverbial front burner, at all times.

  At ETP, our online test prep programs have been tested  in local classrooms over the past four years.  We’ve authored test prep courses that run after school, during summer session, and for some classrooms, on a daily basis.  The classes that practice daily simply practice one question, each morning.  We were delighted and surprised when we began to observe that students who practiced just one question each day had the most significant increase in their scores, seemingly out performing those students who crammed their practice after school or on weekends.  This lead us to create a daily video lesson for our Expert Level SSAT and ISEE prep students.  These videos offer just one lesson, per morning, and model the exact thinking and strategies we teach in order to most effectively approach test questions.  They’re designed to reinforce our online course by keeping each student’s newly acquired skills on the front burner.  Please visit our YouTube channel to see a sample lesson.

  “If I miss one day’s practice, I notice it. If I miss two days’ practice, the critics notice it. If I miss three days’ practice, the public notices it.” This famous quote, attributed to Franz Liszt, is popular with anyone who practices, from pianists to ballet dancers, baseball players to test takers.  By keeping your test skills on the front burner, you’ll be poised to score your best on test day.

When we were starting our test prep program, a school principal asked us why anyone would practice for a test that they can’t see beforehand anyway.

I had just seen a documentary on a race called the Baja 1000, and so had a pretty good metaphor ready to go.

The Baja 1000 course changes every year, so you can’t just rely on last year’s experience. But you can go to Baja before the race and drive the course to get an idea of what you’ll be facing. All the top finishers do.

In the days before the real thing, they drive the thousand miles from beginning to end to get familiar with all the twists and bumps that they’ll see when they do it for real. Now it isn’t quite like the actual race, where you’re under pressure and the clock is ticking in your ear.  In the real one you’ve got other racers on all sides of you, bumping into you, stalling in front of you, trying to get you out of their way. The track gets chewed up from hundreds of sets of tires running all over it for 30 or 40 hours. But the ones who do the best have at least taken a look before the real action kicks in. They know the track better than the ones who didn’t bother to get an early start. The ones behind them.

Good test prep should work like that. No one will get to see the actual questions they’ll face on the test, but getting as familiar as possible with the race track – or the test – is a big boost. And going into a race without having any idea what the track looks like is preparing for trouble.

http://www.teachingsolutions.org/ssat-isee-study-guide Did you know SSAT ISEE test content and questions are constantly changing? That means most SSAT ISEE s...