by Mike Barrett | Apr 12, 2011 | ACT, General, ISEE, LSAT, SAT, SSAT, Tips for Tutors
(Slapping the current year on a Kaplan prep book is a trick to get you to buy another Kaplan prep book every 12 months) Every once in a while a student will ask me if my methods have been updated for “this year’s test.” They ask this for two reasons:...
by Mike Barrett | Apr 4, 2011 | SSAT
Free “practice SSAT questions” are all over the Internet; unfortunately, most of them are terrible. You see, a lot of web site owners know that you’re desperate to find some practice questions–so they just make some up. The problem is that the...
by Mike Barrett | Apr 3, 2011 | ISEE
As with any standardized test score, the higher the score, the better. But that’s really not a very helpful answer, is it? 🙂 Each school will have its own cutoff score that it wants to see from you, and each school will weigh other elements of your application...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 26, 2011 | ACT, General, ISEE, LSAT, SAT, SSAT, Tips for Tutors
(And why should anybody care?) If you’re planning to take a standardized test, you’ve probably devoted some thought to how you’ll prepare. But there’s one fundamental question that a lot of people never seem to ask about the whole testing...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 23, 2011 | ACT, General, ISEE, LSAT, SAT, SSAT, Tips for Tutors
(. . . even though big test prep companies make serious money by telling you otherwise . . . ) If you go looking for test prep books at your local bookstore or on Amazon, you’ll see dozens and dozens of books that claim to offer practice tests you can hone your...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 19, 2011 | ISEE
The essay topics on the ISEE can really cover any kind of simple, open-ended topic. You might be asked to describe your favorite book or your favorite relative, or you might be asked to describe your dream job or a dream vacation, and so on. The important thing is...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 18, 2011 | ISEE
There are a lot of answers to a question like this, and most of them, unfortunately, are bad. The general method people use to prepare for a standardized test like the ISEE is to try some practice questions from a book by Kaplan or Princeton Review or some other...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 16, 2011 | LSAT
This is a tricky question that comes up a lot, so let’s examine it thoroughly. First, different law schools treat multiple test scores in different ways. So the smartest thing you can do is figure out which schools you want to apply to, and then check out their...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 9, 2011 | ISEE, SSAT
The ISEE and the SSAT are both designed to rank the people who apply to elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. The ISEE has 5 section types. The Verbal Reasoning section has synonym questions and sentence completion questions, all multiple-choice. The...
by Mike Barrett | Mar 8, 2011 | ISEE
The ISEE tests different math skills for each level of the test, so before we can talk about which skills are necessary, we have to figure out which level of the test you’re going to take. The Upper Level ISEE is for people who are testing to go into 9th grade...
