|
The SSAT has a very unforgiving curve and for many students it is their first experience with this kind of timed test. We know quite a few kids who had this kind of difficult SSAT experience. There are practice books for the SSATs that can be helpful. Our children used these and they were helpful with developing confidence and familiarity with the test formats and question types. To be most useful, you really need someone (in our house it was my husband) who can go over the answers to the practice tests and help the kids understand why the right answers were right and how to work through to the right answer. You could have your daughter work on practice tests over the winter break from school if there is a January or February SSAT test date that would still work for spring 2009 admissions. The schools your daughter is interested in applying to can tell you about deadlines for submitting scores and whether a winter test date will work.
There are also tutoring companies that specialize in SSAT prep. From what I've seen, one on one tutoring although pricey can raise SSATs scores a whole lot. Chyten is one Massachusetts company that offers this----I am sure there are others in your area. If you're going this route, you'd want a tutor with experience specifically with SSAT prep. A good tutor will teach math and reading problem solving skills that can be useful in high school classes beyond the SSATs and the strategies taught are also directly applicable to all the college admissions tests that start sophomore and junior year. The difficulty at this point is that tutoring to be effective would need to last for quite a few weeks.
Although there aren't formal cut-offs for scores and lots of schools accept students with a wide range of scores, the gap between your daughter's great grades and comparatively weak verbal and math test scores could limit some of the schools where she would be a competitive applicant. There are great schools that aren't as focused on test performance and there are schools that are so swamped with kids with stellar credentials that they might overlook someone with less than perfect scores unless it was balanced by some out of the ordinary strengths. Putting off the application process for a year might give your daughter more time to explore schools with different admissions profiles and also to prep more extensively for the SSATs if she really wants to attend a school or schools that have higher average SSAT scores.
|