Tag: sat

Excel on the SAT, Excel in Life

successPersonally, I know what a Harvard or Ivy League education can do for a person: it opens doors – heaps of them.

I have plenty of anecdotes and I share them in education seminars all the time.  However, many people like pure, concrete statistics and I was on the look out for them earlier today.  While searching though, I landed on (Harvard) Professor Steven Pinker‘s article in the New Republic titled “The Trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League is Broken and only  Standardized Tests can fix it.”   It was an interesting read and had more esoteric vocabulary than I’ve seen in a single article in a long time.  Thus, a quizlet list dedicated to it.

Half way through the read though, I found a very interesting find for anyone in the Test Preparation industry:

Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have tracked a large sample of precocious teenagers identified solely by high performance on the SAT, and found that when they grew up, they not only excelled in academia, technology, medicine, and business, but won outsize recognition for their novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures, and productions in dance, music, and theater. A comparison to a Harvard freshman class would be like a match between the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals.

Does that mean if you get a 2400 that you’ll become one of the world’s richest on Forbes or win a Nobel Peace prize?  

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Only 5 SAT Centers Available in Hong Kong for the January 24, 2015 Test

Seats Available for the January 2015 SAT in Hong Kong

As of December 6th, the last SAT exam in 2014, there appears to only be 5 SAT Test Centers with seats in Hong Kong for the upcoming test in early 2015.

The following snapshots of the SAT registration page for the January 24, 2015 test in Hong Kong shows only the following test centers with available seats:

  • Asia World Expo – Zone V
  • Asia World Expo – Zone W
  • Asia World Expo – Zone XC
  • Asia World Expo – Zone XA
  • Asia World Expo – Zone XB

January 2015 SAT HK Availability 1

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An HB Pencil is OK for the SAT – So are B or 2B Pencils as well

hb_pencilsAccording to the College Board’s website and every piece of literature that writes about the items you bring for the test, you are supposed to bring the following writing utensils:

Two No. 2 pencils and a soft eraser

However, here in Hong Kong, students are used to “HB Pencils” instead.  Do these work?

Yes, they definitely are acceptable.  

According to the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority, they actually say for writing utensils, you should bring:

HB Pencils (No. 2 pencils) and eraser

on their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for the SAT & SAT Subject tests.  You can also bring: 

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Official SAT Essay Writing Paper

sat-essay-paper
We’re big believers in replicating “real testing conditions” to help students perform as they will need to on test day.

In order to do that, you need all the right tools to execute on this.

For the SAT Essay, you need not only a No. 2 pencil, but you need a great topic like some we’ll suggest down below. Very importantly, you’ll be writing on College Board SAT paper and where do you get some of that?

SAT Essay Writing Paper for Download Here!

Click on the following link to Official SAT Essay Paper and you’ll get a very clean and nice set of lined paper that you can use to write as many practice SAT Essays as you want. While it may seem insignificant to some, it gives you the ability to honestly write as much as it would take to fill the two pages in a more “realistic fashion” and help you gauge how much you really need to write. Many of us know that “quantity” is an important factor and it has been proven it can affect SAT Essay Scores.  It’s been supported not only by the New York Times article about Dr. Perelman from MIT  in the previous link, but also by another student who ABC profiled showing that longer essays equate to higher scores.

How do you know if you’re writing long enough?  Well, download the essay writing paper for the SAT and practice a good number of times within 25 minutes to see if you can write enough to fill these two pages.

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