More than three million American students stress over the SAT and ACT college admissions tests every year. Tens of millions more take annual accountability tests in their public schools as required by federal law. These students now have a new tool in their arsenal to take on standardized tests. Piqosity,Read More

Today marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year celebration, also referred to as Spring Festival. This year, the two-week holiday to mark the year of the Monkey lasts from February 8 through February 22 with the celebration of the Lantern Festival. If you want to wish someone a happyRead More

From classroom tests to final exams to large assessments like the SAT and next week’s AP exams, students have a lot of tests to take. Our school system starts testing students at a young age, and everyone knows the connection that test scores have to magnet and private school admission,Read More

The 2015 AP exams start on May 4, just one week from today. Is your teen ready? If your child is taking an AP exam this year, they’ll be studying a lot in the upcoming week (I hope). The advice contained in this guide will help them make the mostRead More

A large portion of the STAAR tests, which are mandated for public school students in grades 3-12, will be administered next week for the elementary and middle school levels. Students in grades 3-8 will be tested in math. Students in grades 3-4 and 6-7 will be tested in reading, andRead More

New evidence from a 2014 study by New York University neuroscientists suggests that decisions requiring more time are interpreted by our brains as being overall less confident decisions. The study found that when we take less time to make a decision, our brains consider such decisions as very confident. WhileRead More

Rice University’s Faculty Senate is reconsidering what type of credit, if any, to give to matriculating students who have scored highly on Advanced Placement Tests. In particular, the faculty is concerned that students entering Rice with more than 20 credit hours (or essentially 2 semesters) are spending significantly less timeRead More

Bubbling answers for hours at a time probably wouldn’t rank very highly for most students if you asked them about their favorite pastime. Most of us have come to understand testing as a necessary evil that must be endured in order to prove a student’s knowledge. If you’re finding yourselfRead More

If your child is applying to a private high school this winter, chances are they will be taking the Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE) as administered by the Educational Records Bureau (ERB). If you’re like most parents, you want your child to have some idea of what the exam willRead More

If you have children in high school, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the National Merit Scholarship and its qualifying test, the PSAT. Every fall, high school juniors across America sit for this test, which is essentially a shortened version of the SAT – five sections with no essay.Read More

Busy students are just now getting back into the swing of things with the new school year underway. As many high schoolers are making plans for how to tackle their core subjects, the thought of tedious college preparation looms in the minds of students and parents alike. One of theRead More

A data analysis error has led to large revisions in the Texas non-profit advocacy group Children at Risk’s annual rankings of schools. The Houston Chronicle reported on May 19 that a miscalculation in the organization’s “growth index” rating led to the errors in the final rankings. The growth index measuresRead More

Seven district teachers and the Houston Federation of Teachers have sued the Houston Independent School District in Federal District Court, charging that the district inappropriately uses standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. The lawsuit has national implications as federal education policy encourages districts to increase their use of standardized evaluations.Read More

Eleven schools in the Houston Independent School District were ranked in U.S. News and World Reports prestigious list of Best High Schools in the United States.  The rankings include more than 4,700 of the top high schools in the country. Carnegie Vanguard, the district’s flagship high school for gifted andRead More

After news broke on how the newly revamped SAT will look in 2016, I heard many people asking these two questions: what is the correlation between the controversial Common Core standards and new SAT, and, will students living in states that have opted out of the Common Core be negativelyRead More

At the beginning of January, the Texas Education Agency issued its new statewide summary of schools that failed to meet state standards for 2013 and whose students are eligible to seek transfer under the state Public Education Grant program. The feature of the summary that grabbed the most headlines wasRead More