Monday, July 25, 2011

Employment Opportunities with Victory Step!


Victory Step offers the most comprehensive test preparation in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metropolitan Area. We are an organization that prides itself for instilling knowledge, confidence and endurance in each student we benefit. Join us, and take the next Victory Step of your career. Victory Step is currently accepting resumes to expand our pool of test preparation instructors and proctors.

Teaching test preparation is a fun and rewarding experience. As a Victory Step instructor, you will have the opportunity to help bright, high-achieving students achieve their dreams of entering first-choice universities and programs.

Please visit http://www.victorysteponline.com/employment.html for more details!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Beating the Clock


Anyone who has taken the SAT knows that it tests your college readiness and critical thinking abilities through math, reading and writing. However, what you may not realize is that, even though it never shows up as a quantified score on the test, the SAT also tests your abilities to prioritize and manage your time. This part of the test, reflected to a degree in your overall score, is just as important as knowing the material for the test.

Should I start off the math section by answering the hard questions at the end, or the easy ones at beginning? Is it more important to put down an answer for all the questions, or should I work more on being right? Do I really only have 1 minute and 15 seconds for each math question? You may ask yourself these questions going into the exam, and even while you are in there, but the important thing to remember is that accuracy will always pay off on this test more than speed.

If you answer every question, but you answer half of them wrong, you only end up hurting yourself on this test. If you waste too much time on the four hard questions in the section and never get to the easy ones, then the questions you have answered have cost more than they have helped. While they may seem insignificant at the time, your overall score will come to reflect these split-second decisions just as much as your knowledge and skills.

Working against the clock in this way offers colleges a snapshot of your ability to prioritize between answering more questions and answering more right. It assesses your capacity to realize you’ve invested too much time on a question and must write it off as a sunk cost. While being able to prioritize on the test may not offer the most accurate picture of your ability to manage your time over a whole semester, these sorts of micro-decisions that you face nonetheless play a big part in your overall success as a student.

To conclude, you must always keep it in your mind that the SAT is as much about managing the short amount of time that you have to ensure the best chance of correctly answering as many questions as possible. It sounds impossible, but it’s all a matter of pacing yourself and realizing when you have spent too much time on a single question for it to help your score any further. While this part of the exam never shows up as a quantified score, it nonetheless plays a major part in the overall score you receive on any given test, so you must tackle it head-on like any other section of the test.

And remember to always do the math on the test, not on the clock.


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Toni Whalen

SAT/ACT Instructor

www.victorysteponline.com


Monday, July 11, 2011

Introducing Yourself through Your Application Essay


When you meet someone and hold a conversation with him or her for the first time, what do you pay attention to? Do you focus only on statistical information, like age, height and other calculable data? Or do you focus on what he or she tells you personally about themselves, such as interests? To some extent, we all do both in any sort of introduction, whether we are conscious of it or not, and that even goes for colleges.

No matter how much data you give them, from your transcripts to your standardized test scores, colleges want to know more about you as a person, not just as a collection of numbers. Since college admissions boards can’t meet and interview every single one of their applicants, they instead use your application essay as your personal introduction to them. Because of this, you should look at your essay as a conversation with a person you hope to get to know better, the colleges you hope to attend.

The prompts colleges give for their application essays generally come in three flavors: broad, extremely broad, and frustratingly detailed. They can be as open-ended as asking about your goals in life and how you plan to achieve them, or sometimes they will ask you to draw upon a specific sort of personal experience, like a funny incident, and explain how it affected you. Other times, colleges are absurdly specific, giving you a quote from Aristotle and asking what it means and how you will apply it to your life and your studies. Since the topics you can discuss in an essay range so widely, it’s difficult to give specific advice on how to write such an essay. However, there are some general guidelines that hold true for every application essay you will ever write.

First, since this is your personal introduction to the school, you want to “dress” to impress. If you were going to a face-to-face interview for a job, you would try to look clean, crisp and professional, and you want to do the same for your essay. That means you want to put your best writing forward for this essay, offering your best arguments and your strongest prose. Once you’re done writing, you must also take the time to revise it yourself and have another person look it over, just to ensure no pesky misplaced commas snuck into it.

Next, you always want to be honest in an essay. Although this does not mean confessing to every fault and flaw you have, you should always remember that outright lies have a tendency of catching up to you. So if you need to write an essay on a great hardship in your life, you don’t want to talk about how the death of your grandmother affected you so deeply if she’s still alive and playing golf three times a week. Remember that making up stories about genuine experiences will never have the same ring of truth, and you can always write more strongly and passionately about real personal experiences anyway.

Finally, as always, be yourself. If you’re the tomboy on the fencing team who builds sets for school plays, don’t try to make yourself out to be the cheerleading prom queen if that’s not you. The essay is the only part of your application where you get to showcase who you really are, so don’t try to make it up. That’s not what colleges want.

Remembering these simple guidelines can help you not only with the applications for undergraduate programs, but the myriad other essays you’ll have to write in the coming years for scholarships, grants, internships, and graduate and professional schools. This is a skill you’ll be using for the rest of your life!


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Victory Step