Meet Scholarship Winner Cleo
Meet Cleo
When Cleo isn’t working hard to achieve academic excellence, she enjoys playing sports and participating in performing arts. She plays golf for fun and is looking forward to trying volleyball at her new school. Cleo will also be in band next year; she has been practicing the flute to get up to speed.
Cleo’s ISEE Preparation
To prepare for her first Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE) test date, Cleo completed a single practice test. But when she got the results, Cleo realized she should have done more to prepare. She needed to practice the content on the Mathematics Achievement, Reading Comprehension, and Verbal Reasoning sections, and she also needed a confidence boost and a more positive outlook. The second time around, she prepared on the Test Innovators platform and with a Test Innovators tutor, Matthew.
After completing a practice test, Cleo and Matthew worked through the analysis question by question to help Cleo understand how to solve each problem she missed. Cleo attributes this systematic approach to her success in learning the plethora of content on the test. By the second test, Cleo was much more comfortable with the material.
In addition to teaching her content, Matthew taught Cleo some key test-taking strategies and skills. One of these skills was time management. For the hard questions, Cleo learned to make an educated guess and move on. Then, after answering all of the questions, Cleo would go back to the hard questions to continue working on them. This strategy prevented Cleo from spending too much time on questions she didn’t know and instead gave her enough time to answer the questions she did know. When Cleo took the ISEE a second time, she was comfortable with the content, confident in her strategies and skills, and had a new-found sense of positivity.
When Cleo first took the ISEE, she scored in the 29th percentile, but after months of diligent preparation, she raised her scores to the 64th percentile. Her hard work and dedication made her a great candidate for our 2018-2019 Independent School Tuition Scholarship.
Cleo’s Next School
In the fall, Cleo will be starting 7th grade at the Lovett School. Lovett is an independent day school located in Atlanta, Georgia, and serves 1,655 students in grades PK-8. The Lovett School is a community that seeks to develop young men and women of honor, faith, and wisdom with the character and intellect to thrive in college and in life. With an emphasis on the whole child, Lovett provides integrated experiences in academics, arts, athletics, and service.
Cleo is excited for the new opportunities Lovett offers. Academically, she is excited for all the different math courses, specifically an advanced course that she can work her way up to; she’s excited for the opportunity to prove herself. Cleo is also looking forward to getting involved in extracurricular activities, such as volleyball.
Additionally, Cleo and her parents are excited for her to engage in the arts. Lovett offers a variety of art programs and encourages students to get involved, which is something that stood out to them. Cleo is particularly interested in joining band and drama.
Cleo’s Advice for Other Students
Cleo’s advice for other students preparing to take the ISEE is to stay patient, as the preparation process can be stressful and time-consuming. She also recommends spending a lot of time practicing because, she emphasizes, the more you practice, the better you will do on the test. Cleo cautions other students from piling all the work on themselves and recommends seeking help in order to reduce stress and avoid becoming overwhelmed. Lastly, Cleo encourages students stay patient with their parents and keep in mind they’re just trying to help.
How Can Test Innovators Help Your Student?
Test Innovators is here to build test confidence through personalized practice. The system dynamically adapts using insights from over 20,000,000 questions answered on the Test Innovators platform to help each individual student focus on the most impactful practice. Timing analysis helps students learn effective time management, personalized recommendations target areas of weakness, and tools to build test-taking skills ensure that students have the skills and confidence they need to be successful on test day. Test Innovators helps students achieve their goals by helping them get the scores they need to gain admission to their dream schools.
Test Innovators has helped over 100,000 students improve their test scores to gain acceptance into schools with selective admissions processes. They offer prep for the Secondary School Admissions Test (SSAT), the Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE), the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and the ACT. They also offer tutoring for all four tests.
