TL;DR:
- Students rarely know when they’re ready for the SAT or how confident they should feel walking into the exam
- We’ve launched the world’s first Readiness Score to help students predict how prepared they are for the SAT
- The Readiness Score analyzes student competency across more than 100 micro skills to determine the likelihood that students will achieve their goal score
- One surprising discovery: You only need to know roughly 60% of the topics on the SAT to get a 1400!
The inspiration behind The Everydae Readiness Score
A good SAT tutor knows what a student has seen and what they haven’t, and will often have (or think they have) an intuitive sense as to what a student still needs to do to get to their goal score.
But intuition isn’t perfect. We develop favorite things to teach and favorite ways to teach those things. Sometimes that means turning a blind eye to the weird things that don’t fit into those ways of teaching — even if those things show up on the test more and more as the SAT shifts to better match up with common core.
One of our missions at Everydae is to build the best digital tutor (and in doing so, avoid the mistakes that human tutors tend to make).
So as we laid out the curriculum for Everydae, we had an idea:
What if we could figure out not just everything that’s on the SAT, but also how much studying that topic would actually help a student on the test?
To find what’s on the test, we did what any sane group of curriculum developers would do. We found every single released SAT exam from The College Board, printed them, and then cut out every single question.
Then we sorted those questions into all the skills students needed to know. And then sorted them again. And again.
We noted which questions used multiple skills, which questions were sorted as two different things by the College Board but that were actually testing the exact same thing.
Once everything was sorted, we began to count and to arrange those piles of SAT questions into groups.
On average, what was the smallest number of things a student needed to know in order to get a 500 on the math section? A 650? A 700?
What was the most efficient way to get each score? How did a student’s accuracy in a single skill affect their score?
Three major takeaways from this rigorous research:
- Students only need to know roughly 60% of all the skills tested on the SAT in order to score a 1400! (that's top 5%). To get from a 1400 to a 1600, you need to know the other 40%;
- Test taking techniques taught for so long by SAT test prep companies across the board had become less and less applicable with each new test;
- Some of the topics we’d long dismissed as “unimportant” were actually going to give students the biggest bang for their buck in terms of return on their study time.
We realized that if we found the answers useful, our students would too. We just needed a way to package all that information up into something that wouldn’t be overwhelming. And thus the Everydae Readiness Score was born!
How the Everydae Readiness Score works
The Everydae Readiness Score uses three criteria to estimate how prepared you are for test day:
- The importance of each skill on the SAT,
- Your performance on each of these skills, and
- Your goal score.
We care about the relative importance of each skill because it reflects that not all skills are created equal as far as the SAT is concerned.
For example, knowing how to find probability from a table is going to get a student far more points on the test than will knowing how to complete the square.
So if a student knows how to complete the square but not how to find probability from a table, we should think of them as less ready for the SAT than a student who knows how to find probability from a table but not how to complete the square.
We care about accuracy because of something that we’ve seen over and over again in our private tutoring practices: students who think just because they’ve shown up to session means they’re going to reach their goal score, even if they aren’t doing well on a lot of different topics. If you aren’t getting questions right when you’re practicing, you aren’t going to get them right on test day.
We’ve also seen students who are reluctant to perfect their foundations because all they want to study are the “700-level SAT questions.” Ignoring the opportunity to raise their floor in lieu of trying to break their ceiling, these students inevitably get frustrated when they don’t reach their goal score.
Speaking of which, the last piece of the puzzle is your goal score.
The math here is simple: you don’t need to get as many questions right to achieve a 500 as you do to get a 700. So if you’re trying to hit a 700 on your SAT, it’s going to take mastering more skills in order to be ready than it would if you were trying to get a 500.
And because of the insight gathered from deconstructing and synthesizing all of those officially released SAT exams, we know which skills should matter most to which students based on their goals.
Ultimately, the Everydae Readiness Score gives you a way to track the part of your learning that practice tests don’t. So complete your first mission and unlock your Readiness Score today.
How to interpret your Everydae Readiness Score
Think of your Readiness Score like a weather report. It's a prediction of the likelihood that something is going to happen.
Meaning, if your Readiness Score is a 65, that essentially means that we're saying, "if you took your SAT today, based on how you're performing in Everydae so far, we think there's a 65% chance that you'll hit your goal score."
This is important because your goal should not be to hit a 100 Readiness Score. That will almost never happen (especially if your target score is really high). Because at the end of the day, it's nearly impossible for us to say that we are 100% confident that you'll get a perfect 1600.
Just like a weather reporter (or app) suggesting that there's a 50% chance of rain, your Readiness Score is our way of predicting the likelihood that you will achieve your target SAT score at that moment. So every time your Readiness Score increases, that's a great sign that you're making significant improvement!
As you've probably heard us say many times before, focus on progress, not perfection :)
This post was written by Laura Hubbard, Everydae’s Director of Academics. Laura has 10,000+ hours of tutoring and tutor-training experience. She was previously Director of Academics for the adaptive learning product ORION, directed curriculum creation at AJ Tutoring, and was a course writer at Chegg and manager at The Princeton Review.