For tutors and educational consultants not familiar with non-published, released tests – they are official tests that are not published as part of the Official ACT test prep Book. However, the ACT occasionally releases stand alone prior year tests or sample tests for students to practice. Over the years a wide variety of such tests have been released publicly by both the ACT and the College Board for the SAT.

Please note that the actual test questions are the copyright material of the publishing organizations and Socrato does not distribute the test questions directly or on-behalf of other organizations. However our proprietary taxonomy allows for Tutors and Educational Consultants to use our software to automatically create performance reports for students online.

Please stay tuned to the Socrato news blog as we continue to announce the availability of additional tests and exams (*hint hint*) on Socrato. As always, contact us if you have further questions about the use of these released tests or you would like to make use of the Socrato software to grade your students’ tests.

Chyten emphasized that support and excellence of services, and their application and implementation into Chyten’s service practices as key factors that contribute to its Vendor of the Year selection process. According to Chyten, Socrato’s software and customer support contributed to the growth of their business and brand, and enabled Chyten to provide its Magnostic series of SAT, ACT, and SAT vs. ACT tests as part of their standard offering.

Noted Chyten, “Socrato is one of the best vendors we’ve ever worked with and they’ve done an incredible job supporting all of our franchises. Socrato’s diagnostics and performance reporting really helped us improve student ACT and SAT test results.” The award is a token of thanks, appreciation and respect.

“We’re extremely honored and flattered to be the recipient of Chyten’s award,” said Socrato co-founder Prashant Kaw. “It’s extremely gratifying to be able to help our customers achieve their business objectives and we’re proud to see our customers derive significant business value from our test publishing, scoring and analytics software.”

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to Chyten for such an incredible honor and we hope you continue to grow your businesses and improve the lives of the students you touch!

1. A List of All Your Members

In the past one could only see and manage members within specific groups. This made it tough to gauge how many total members (instructors and students) you had in Socrato. With this new view you can now manage a list of all your unique members in Socrato.

2. Member details and Session list consolidation

Now you can manage all your student sessions on their profile. Historically if a student was in two classes (say English and Math) you had to manage their sessions in two separate groups. We’ve now consolidated all their sessions one place making it a lot easier of your to track and report on individual student performance across all their classes

Please let us know what you think. We love feedback from our users and customers so we can continue to improve your experience with Socrato. Thanks.

So what was the goal behind our new design?

Why the New Look?

There were several goals behind our redesign.  First off, we wanted a more professional-looking homepage that represented who we are and all of our offerings. Secondly, we wanted to improve the site user experience for our customers and end users. We were able to consolidate all of our site content under a single navigational structure and separate it from the Socrato app making it a lot easier to find what you are looking for.

And lastly, we wanted to separate our company news from the Socrato Learning Intelligence blog. We recognized that a lot of our blog subscribers were more interested in our helpful, educational information rather than hearing about our company and now they can subscribe to both feeds independently.

Let us Know What You Think

As always, we would love to hear from you.  If you’re one of our site visitors or customers experiencing our new design, please let us know your thoughts in the comments. What do or don’t you like about it?  How can we  improve it even further so you have the best experience using Socrato?  Thanks.

Some of the changes you might notice -

• In certain situation during Online Take Test (especially for ACT tests), the answer choices were not showing up properly, that issue has been resolved.
• While printing tests and bubblesheets from library, question content was not printed correctly. This issue was impacting ACT tests and questions with images. This issue has been fixed.

Additional SAT tests rolled out -

• We now offer Scoring and Performance Reporting for additional SAT tests and custom SAT tests. These tests are in addition to one which are available from the Official SAT Guide. Please drop us an email if you want access to these.

As always we try to do as much testing as possible. If you encounter any issue, please feel free to reach out to us.

• Ability to configure custom branding for Scoring and Performance Reports
  • Customers can now upload their logo, choose a color scheme, and create their own custom branded reports. This feature will be accessible to customers by request only.
• “Section Reports” (Mini Reports) for ACT and SAT tests
  • We incorporated a number of backend changes in the Scoring and Performance Reporting module. This will allow us to roll out “Mini Reports” in near future. Now, if a student practices only a single section of an ACT or SAT test, they can generate a “mini report” with the same level of detail and insight as our full report; we even provide a projected scaled score.
    • For example, an ACT test student can practice only the science section, and will be able to generate detailed scoring and performance analysis report for just that section. Stay tuned for more details on this in a future post, or contact us if you’d like to be an early adopter.
• Coming Soon: Additional tests for SAT and ACT
  • Soon we will be announcing support for released/retired ACT and SAT published tests (not in the books), as well as support for custom tests. Due to many customer requests, we’re attempting to support as many of the released SAT and ACT tests as we can. Let us know if you’re interested in being notified when these get released, or if there are specific test versions you’re seeking.

As always we have tested as much as possible, but there is always a possibility that you may encounter issues. If you see something that needs our attention please reach out to us.

Team Socrato

Not a huge release, number of minor fixes and enhancements in SAT/ACT custom diagnostic reports area.

• An issue related to the recalculation of the scores for SAT, ACT, and SAT/ACT comparison reports has been resolved. After uploading the session in bulk mode… if the user edits the session again online, the updated session was not scored correctly. The issue was introduced recently due to fixes to one of the custom reports.
• In order to do the billing we track the number of student sessions and the report generation activity. Many times due to user data entry error, or for other reasons, tutors needed to completely delete the session and reload data which recreated the new student session. Now the deleting of the session is tracked, so there is fully reconcilable audit trail of usage and billing.
• A few weeks back we discovered that during heavy load, the report usage activity was not getting tracked properly. No information was lost, but we needed to calculate the usage at the end of month, rather in real time. We have fixed the issue.
• Modified the ACT/SAT comparison test diagnostic report (this is applicable to custom tests) which now does the correlation of two scores (the SAT and ACT) and also makes the recommendation about what test to take.

Please let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions.

Students and tutors who use traditional books, paper / pencil to practice and prepare for the ACT exam can now get the best of two worlds. Work with traditional printed books like Real ACT Test Prep Guide to practice and fill out the bubble sheets on paper; and use Socrato’s ACT Diagnostic Assessment Service to create the best ACT diagnostic analysis.

After paper based practice, in a few clicks tutors or students can enter student test practice responses (bubble sheet data) into Socrato using one of our convenient data entry options: directly enter as bubble sheet (student or tutor), enter in bulk mode, or load files automatically generated via a bubble sheet scanner.

Once done, within seconds the Socrato online service does the grading, scaling, scoring and detailed analysis. This service takes our previous work on our Free ACT test analysis and scoring tool further. It removes all complexities of ACT test scoring, ACT composite score calculation etc. The automatically generated reports can be printed, emailed or viewed online. The ACT report is now on par with our highly regarded SAT diagnostic service.

The diagnostic analysis is one of the best. It covers:

• Full history of student progress, detailed grading, scoring, scaling, and even the point cost analysis in each subject area
• Skills, difficulty level, subject area content analysis, and question responses detail
• Socrato analysis goes “beyond scores” and analyzes student test taking tendencies and behavior

This analysis leads to personalized, concrete recommendations, and performance improvement in less time. You can download the sample diagnostic report for the ACT test for an Individual student here.

Tutors can look online or download detailed diagnostic reports for an individual student to help them one-on-one, or look at a class/group as a whole to optimize the strategy and instruction plan for the most optimal outcome. The entire process is very similar to Socrato’s SAT, MCAS, and other exam assessment offerings. To see how Socrato generates one of the best diagnostic assessments for the ACT, SAT and other tests see the video here.

By combining the best of two – paper / pencil for practice, and computers to do the analysis, Socrato saves time, improves student results, and allows tutors / students to focus effort on instruction and learning.

Socrato allows for branding of reports and customization of learning analytics to meet the specific needs and styles of our customers. If you are interested in learning more about this service please contact us.

“Socrato: The Future of Test Prep?” by Matt Fellows

“Socrato has the potential to strip standardized tests of their mysterious, intimidating power, and turn them into more helpful learning tools…”

Read More

We recently published the details for an ACT Score calculator. After iteration we are now making it available for direct download from Learning Analytics blog (blog.socrato.com). This ACT Score calculator simplifies the grading and analysis process for ACT practice tests. The calculator was designed for Real ACT Test Prep Guide but it can be used with other ACT test prep guides.

The ACT Test Score or ACT composite score calculator – captures, tracks, and performs following ACT test score calculations and analysis.

• Correct, incorrect, and omitted question count for ACT practice test
• ACT full scaled score
• ACT composite score calculation
• ACT percentile rank
• ACT subscore scaled score
• ACT point cost at composite score level for each subject area
• Point cost per question for each subject area
• ACT point cost at subscore level
• ACT combined English and writing score

If you are interested in getting a very detailed diagnostic and score analysis for your ACT test practice session, you can also try Socrato’s ACT Diagnostic Analysis Software which greatly reduces the effort on tutors and students. Here is the sample diagnostic report for test practice.

You can download the calculator here.