The “ISEE 2019-2020 season” is now mostly over, which can mean only one thing for Piqosity — it’s safe to start tinkering with the software again! We’re excited to announce our first major release of 2020, which brings a host of performance improvements and new features.

New Features

  1. More Student Stats
  2. Tutor-Led Practice
  3. Student Self-Assessment
  4. New ACT Course with 7 Full-Length Tests
  5. More ISEE Full-Length Tests

More Student Stats page brings a wealth of new and updated statistics to help students and their educators better measure student gains, strengths, and weaknesses. Highlights include:

  1. Baseline Score – Piqosity now automatically calculates a student’s “starting point” or baseline score. We calculate this score based off of the first 25 questions the student scores in each topic of a test. The baseline score will be on the same scale used by the actual test. For example, a student’s baseline ISEE score might be a 3 out of 9.
  2. Improvement From Baseline – This statistic is a measure of student score gain while they have been using Piqosity and simply the difference between the current estimated test-day score and the baseline score.
  3. Pacing – Piqosity now estimates how much of the test a student is likely to complete based off of how much time they spend on a question versus how much time they are allotted. For example, if a student has 10 minutes to complete 10 questions, that means they are allotted 60 seconds per question. However, if they spend 90 seconds per question on Piqosity, then this Pacing stat will estimate that the student will only complete 50% of the test.

Tutor-Led Practice is a new feature that enables educators to work alongside students on practice without fear of inflating the student’s in-app statistics.

When working any practice set, students can simply toggle the button for “tutor-led practice,” and Piqosity will not include the results of that practice set when calculating overall statistics like “estimated score” or “improvement from baseline.”

Student Self-Assessment (pictured above) is a short survey at the end of each practice set that asks the student to be a little introspective and includes the following questions:

  1. How difficult did you think the test was?
  2. How much time did you think you had?
  3. How hard did you try?

All students must complete the assessment before they are allowed to submit their practice set for scoring.

New ISEE Practice Tests

We have added 1 additional full-length test for the ISEE Upper Level, bringing our total to 8 full-length practice tests for the Upper Level.

We have also added 1 additional full-length test for the ISEE Lower Level, similarly bringing that total to 8 full-length tests for the Lower Level. We will soon publish a 9th full-length ISEE Lower Level test.

These new ISEE tests are included for all new and existing users, and there is no additional charge to access them.

ACT 7 Full-Length Practice Tests

After more than a year of development time, we’re excited to be launching a brand new ACT course with 7 full-length practice tests for the US’s most widely administered college admissions exam. This ACT course is now available to all users–at no charge for a limited time.

Performance Improvements

We’re in the process of updating how we store and calculate what are an increasingly complex and growing amount of statistics we track on student performance. The Student Dashboard and More Stats pages are the first user-facing areas to benefit from this upgrade.

As a result of our back-end work, the Student Dashboard now typically loads in less than one second, and the More Stats page can actually exist.

This engineering work is ongoing, and all major pages including the Leaderboard, Educator Dashboard, and Organization Dashboard will benefit from this significant performance improvement.

Still to Come

We have a busy spring and summer schedule planned. We have 7 full-length practice tests for the SAT, which we will take live in the first half of the year. We’ll also be releasing more practice tests for the ISEE.

A digital whiteboard is in the works, which will allow students to “do their work” right on their tablets or touch-screen laptops. We also plan to launch “lessons,” which will bring modular, adaptive teaching content directly into the Piqosity platform.

We are continuing to improve our backend systems to improve speed and reliability for educators, tutoring companies, and schools.