Test Preparation (ISEE, SSAT, SAT, ACT, SHSAT, GMAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT) Archives

Angela Krontiris Lowery

December 25, 2016

As a young child, Angela Krontiris Lowery found herself creating and solving self-assigned numerical and geometrical puzzles. From summer evenings spent predicting the schedules of the railroad trains near her house, to winter weekends spent sequencing similar sidewalk contours on her pocket map of Brooklyn, Angela’s detective-like curiosity led her to indulge in an education filled with mathematical lucidity and certainty.

Angela graduated with honors from Fordham University with a BA in mathematics and business. While attending Fordham, Angela successfully tutored many students in the HEOP (Higher Education Opportunity Program); because of her highly regarded teaching style, she now serves as a professor for HEOP at Fordham University. Angela is also an instructor at the Mathnasium Learning Center in Park Slope where she brings her engaging and interactive lessons to the table. She is known to build her tutoring sessions around meaningful examples relevant to her students’ passions, hobbies, and intrigues.

Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1 & 2, Geometry, Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus, College Algebra, Statistics, and Calculus are all subjects Angela is ready to tackle with her students. In addition to elementary and middle school math topics, concepts and skills, Angela also tutors for the math and science sections of standardized tests, including ISEE and ACT.

Aside from her love for mathematics, she plays softball in a women’s league in Brooklyn. She enjoys the fall and going to New Paltz and the Fingerlakes to see the fall foliage.

Dan Moore

June 13, 2016

Dan Moore graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a Bachelor’s degree in Television Writing and a Master’s degree in English Education. He has worked as either a private tutor, a special education paraprofessional or a permanent substitute in New York City public schools since he graduated in 2012.

Dan Moore has managed and run in-class college essay-writing workshops and tutored/taught a variety of subjects including all levels of English, History, Social Studies and some Sciences. He also specializes in SAT, ACT, ISEE, CTP and Stanford-Binet test preparation. In addition to these, Dan helps his mom (a music teacher for the last 30 years in New Jersey) run a weekly class teaching sketch comedy to elementary students during the winter.

Dan’s teaching style is highly personal and highly empathetic; he is adept at tailoring his lessons to the individual learning needs of his students. He has the subject-area expertise to really challenge the highest-level learners but also the patience and teaching experience to maximize sessions with students whose greatest strength lies in other subjects. Having worked in New York City public schools for several years, he has seen all kinds of learners and can use their strengths to work on their weaknesses.

During the pandemic, Dan attended a coding bootcamp and began working as a full-time computer programmer in 2022. He tutors in the evenings after slowly, patiently reducing the number of error messages he sees all day long and getting phone menus and call trees to work.

Outside of teaching and programming, Dan is a Sports Emmy-nominated writer for Bleacher Report’s animated series Game of Zones.

Zachary Brewer

April 15, 2016

Zachary Brewer is a private tutor specializing in elementary math, literacy, and technology. He is also a middle school math tutor and a writing tutor for all grade levels.

Currently, Zach is the Educational Technology Specialist at Corlears School where he teaches all of school’s pre-kindergarten to fifth grade classes, integrating technology into every subject. Zach is passionate about technology, particularly the opportunities it gives students to apply traditional subject matter in modern ways. For instance, his students have learned math concepts through programming video games, they have prepared video news reports about events around the school, they have created animations about science topics, and they have written, filmed, and edited monster movies.

Previously, Zach was a math enrichment teacher at P.S. 85 in the Bronx. There, he designed and taught a supplemental mathematics curriculum called “Math Art” to third through fifth graders. The visual, hands-on activities of Math Art reinforced and expanded upon math topics while increasing student involvement and sense of accomplishment. He has since turned the curriculum into a self-published book that has sold over 5,000 copies. A lover of writing, Zach has begun work on his second book about educational technology.

In his free time, Zach enjoys hiking and camping, photography, and playing 1960’s and 70’s pop songs on the piano.

Charlotte Kent

April 15, 2016

Raised in a diplomatic family, Charlotte Kent wandered across Europe with her parents, becoming fluent in French while attending the Lyçée Français, before settling in the United States to attend boarding school at Philips Academy Andover. She then pursued a “great books” education, receiving her BA in Philosophy and the History of Math in 2002 at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. She worked for an art school and then ran the education division of a medical publishing company in New York before returning to graduate school in 2009. While pursuing her graduate work, she was a Fellow at The Writer’s Institute, working under Leo Carey (The New Yorker), John Freeman (Freeman, formerly of Granta), among others. She has written for both academic and general audience journals and magazines. In 2014, Charlotte completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center on contemporary experiments in art writing.

Charlotte Kent, PhD, has taught at New York University, the School for Visual Arts, Mercy College, as well as CUNY’s The City College of New York and Baruch College. As a private tutor, she has worked with high schools students from around the world and across the NYC area through the college application essay and across diverse subjects, including all levels of French. Most of her work focuses on helping students improve their reading comprehension and critical writing across all subjects in preparation for papers, exams, standardized tests, and applications. Beyond her work tutoring in-person, Charlotte has worked via Skype and other collaborative tools with students who live abroad, move, or travel frequently with their families.

SCAT

January 3, 2016

$SCAT Testing$

History of SCAT (The School and College Ability Test)

Since 1985, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth has identified talented students in elementary grades using the SCAT (School and College Ability Test) has two sections: Verbal and Quantitative. Each section contains 55 questions, including five unidentified experimental items that do not count toward the student’s score.School and College Ability Test. In May 1996, CTY purchased all rights to the SCAT from Educational Testing Service (ETS) and entered into an agreement with Prometric to computerize the SCAT and make the test available at computer test centers.

Versions

There are three different versions of the SCAT.

Students in grades 2-3 take the Elementary SCAT designed for 3rd through 6th graders.
Students in grades 4-5 take the Intermediate SCAT designed for 6th through 9th graders.
Students in grades 6 and above take the Advanced SCAT designed for 9th through 12th graders.

Because this is an above-grade-level test, after the test, you’ll receive information that shows how your child’s score compares to that of students in his or her grade as well as students in the higher grades for whom the test questions were originally designed.

Test Format

The SCAT has two sections: Verbal and Quantitative. Each section contains 55 questions, including five unidentified experimental items that do not count toward the student’s score.

Verbal Section: The verbal section measures a student’s understanding of the meaning of words and verbal reasoning ability. Verbal questions are multiple-choice analogies, which require a student to choose the best pair of words to complete an analogy. Often, there may appear to be more than one answer that fits the analogy, but the correct answer is the one that best completes the analogy.
Quantitative Section: The quantitative section measures a student’s understanding of fundamental number operations. The quantitative questions are multiple-choice mathematical comparisons, which require a student to compare two mathematical quantities and determine which is greater. Problems are intended to measure mathematical reasoning ability and thus often do not require computation.

Test Scoring

SCAT Scaled Scores range from 400 to 516 depending on the level the student takes. This scaled score is based on the number of questions the student answers correctly out of the 50 scored questions in each section.

Elementary Level

Verbal Range = 400-471
Quantitative Range = 412-477

Intermediate Level

Verbal Range = 405-487
Quantitative Range = 417-506

Advanced Level

Verbal Range = 410-496
Quantitative Range = 424-514

Test Timing and Breaks

The two sections, each 22 minutes long, are separated by a 10-minute break. The break is optional and student-directed. In other words, the test center administrator will not start and end the break. It is the student’s responsibility to return to the test on time. If students take any other breaks during the test, timing will continue.

Your appointment time will be 90 minutes but the test itself usually takes less than one hour.

Programs for Grades 2-4

CTY offers summer day programs for qualified students who have completed grades 2-4 in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area and New York City, as well as in West Los Angeles, La Jolla, and Pasadena, California. Eligibility for the program is based on what grade the student has completed, as well as his/her score on the CTY-administered SCAT test. You can also view the 2014 catalog, including sample syllabi, and a list of courses by site under Young Students Catalog and Resources.

Programs for Grades 5-6

CTY offers summer residential and day programs on the east and west coasts for qualified students who have completed grades 5-6. Day site locations (which also include classes for students who have completed grades 2-4) are in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area and New York City, as well as in West Los Angeles, La Jolla, and Pasadena, California. Eligibility for the program is based on what grade the students has completed, as well as his/her score on the CTY-administered SCAT and/or STB tests. You can also view the 2014 catalog, including sample syllabi, and a list of courses by site under Young Students Catalog and Resources.

Program Dates for 2015 (most sites):

First session: June 28 – July 17
Second session: July 19 – August 7

Application Process

Step 1: Establishing eligibility
Students who are interested in our summer programs must take one of our designated tests to establish eligibility for CTY 7th Grade and Above: Intensive Studies or CTY 7th Grade and Above: Academic Explorations. They must take the SCAT test to establish eligibility for the Young Students Program for students in grades 2-6.

If you are not sure what courses/courses your child is eligible for, please go here: https://ctyjhu.org/eligibility/eligibility_TS.cfm.
We highly recommend that students who wish to attend our summer programs participate in CTY’s Talent Search. By doing so, students increase their chances at being assigned to a course in our summer programs.

Step 2: Complete an application
You may either apply online or fill out a paper-based application form. Please visit our Forms page to access the application and other application-related forms.

Important Deadlines

To be considered in CTY’s initial course assignment process, applications must be received at CTY by end of business on January 15. Refer to “How Courses are Assigned” for additional detail.

After January 16, applications received by the close of business each Wednesday are considered for course assignment, following the same process.

The course assignment process continues once each week until registration closes in late spring. However, for applications received after April 12, a late fee is charged.

Scheduling for the SCAT Test

Follow this link to get started with your CTY account and test registration:
https://cty.jhu.edu/get-started

When to expect scores

Scores are mailed by CTY 2-3 weeks after testing. CTY automatically receives all SCAT and STB scores directly from Prometric, however, SAT and ACT testers must request that their scores are sent to CTY. Contact CTY at 410-735-6278 if you have not received your scores.

What’s next

After CTY has received your scores, we will send all Talent Search participants the following:

Certificate of Participation
Qualification Letter (indicates CTY programs for which the student is qualified)
After the Test (resources and test statistics)

Retesting

All students can retest with CTY. SCAT and STB testers may test twice during the academic year (July – June). SAT and ACT testers may test as often as they wish. CTY will always consider the highest scores.