About Shelby Joe

Shelby Joe 周 is the Founder of Piqosity. He has more than 20 years of experience in education as an entrepreneur, professor, and tutor. Shelby earned his BA in Political Science from Rice University. Born and raised in Mississippi, he now resides in Houston but has also lived in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hamburg.

Mississippi National Merit Semifinalists 2023-2024

For 163 Mississippi high school seniors, the 2024 National Merit Scholarship Competition brought good news: these high-achieving students have earned the celebrated “Semifinalist” designation. In order to do so, they had to score among the top 1% of Mississippi students who took the PSAT/NMSQT in October of 2022.  As a percentage of the senior [...]

By |2023-09-15T16:21:48-05:00September 15th, 2023|SAT Test Prep|

The Differences Between the ACT and SAT

If you're a high schooler getting ready for the college admissions process, you may be wondering about the differences between ACT and SAT exams. Versus the SAT, the ACT generally presents questions in a less complex manner but requires students to know more advanced concepts and work more quickly. However, our experience working with [...]

By |2023-09-07T14:52:16-05:00September 7th, 2023|ACT Test Prep, SAT Test Prep|

How to Tutor the ISEE, a Guide to Getting Started

ISEE (commonly pronounced I-See) is an acronym that stands for the Independent School Entrance Exam and is taken by students applying to private schools in the United States. This peer-normed, standardized test is commonly taken for students applying to middle school (grades 5/6-8) and high school (grades 9-12). Students can also take the test [...]

By |2023-09-01T14:42:10-05:00September 1st, 2023|ISEE Test Prep, Teachers & Tutors, ZPQA Teacher|

ISEE Sample Essay Prompts and Responses

The ISEE Essay is the fifth and final section of the ISEE lower, middle, and upper level tests. This personal essay is not scored; however, a copy of it is sent to each school to which families send their scores. Students have 30-minutes in which to write up to 2 pages in response to [...]

By |2023-08-24T12:32:41-05:00August 24th, 2023|Favorites, ISEE Test Prep|

Free ACT Official Practice Test PDFs and Answer Explanations

This page contains professionally-written answer explanations to the freely available, official ACT practice tests floating around on the internet. Depending on the year, either the ACT or the SAT is the most popular college admissions test in the United States. About 1.3 million students in the graduating class of 2022 took the ACT or [...]

App Service Disruption

Dear Piqosity Students, Parents, and Educators, This is a notice that our servers have suffered a security breach. What happened? On July 2, 2023 at approximately 9pm US Central Time, we discovered that our Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting account had been the target of unauthorized access and our primary and secondary systems deleted. [...]

By |2023-07-06T16:34:16-05:00July 2nd, 2023|Piqosity News|

College Admissions Interview Tips from the Interviewer

College admissions interviews are an opportunity for students to talk to an alumni of their prospective school and showcase their personality as a factor in their admissions process. I've interviewed prospective candidates for Rice University—below, I’ll tell you about some of my interviews and explain to you some things you or your child should [...]

By |2023-03-22T18:07:01-05:00March 24th, 2023|College Resources|

Announcing Launch of Pre-Calculus and ELA 10 Courses

We're excited to announce the launch of our new ELA 10 and Pre-Calculus courses designed primarily for ninth grade students. They come bundled together for unparalleled levels of practice to help with the challenge of beginning high school. With these launches and our future roadmap, Piqosity is taking its place as the web's leading e-learning [...]

By |2023-03-24T10:04:06-05:00March 23rd, 2023|English, Math, Piqosity News|

Scheduled Maintenance March 15-16

The Piqosity app will be offline for a major code release starting at 11:59pm on Wednesday, March 15, 2023, that will last until at least 6am Thursday, March 16th US central time. As previously announced, there will be some significant features in this release. Feature and Content Updates Pre-Calculus and ELA 10 are going [...]

By |2023-03-17T17:06:24-05:00March 6th, 2023|Piqosity News|
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