“Phone! It’s Maya*,” Akshay’s mother said.
He made a face. Maya was cousin who lived in a small town in Karnataka. She was a year younger and could be fun, but mostly, he scene-zoned her. And now she’d called on his mother’s phone.
“Hi, Maya, I’m just about to take a test and can only talk for two minutes. Tell me quickly,” he said.
“I think I want to go abroad to study. Papa and Ma say that if I ace the standardized tests, they’ll seriously consider sending me. What should I do?”
Akshay couldn’t believe his ears. “This is great, and I have the most awesome news for you. You can study with Collegify, the ones who are training me and helping me get to the college of my dreams.”
“I can’t come to Delhi. The vacations are already over.”
“You don’t need to come here! Collegify has launched a revolutionary E-learning platform for SAT prep and ACT coaching. It uses artificial intelligence, AI, to pinpoint the level at which you are comfortable, gives you tests at that level to build confidence, identifies weak topics in each test area, gives you more practice in those–”
“Slowly! I’m trying to write this down. Can you repeat after ‘gives tests that build confidence’?”
“The platform personalizes your learning. You’ll get more practice in areas where you’re weak, and as you get better, AI will begin giving you more challenging tests,” Akshay said.
“I tried a few tests from books. The thing that really kills me is Critical Reading. The choices are so tricky!” Maya said.
“I found Writing impossible,” Akshay said, “but with just five days of practice, I feel better about myself and my ability to tackle the Writing section. And you know the best part? You can take tests with others online and get your percentile score. Of course, we’ll be taking the test against many thousands of others on the actual day, but this way, at least we know where we stand against some others, instead of just our score alone.”
“Percentile score? I’ve just begun exploring standardized tests, so I don’t really understand what this means,” Maya said.
“The short way to understand this is that even if you scored 1450 out of 1600, which is a pretty good score, it won’t be of much use if most of the students who take the test on the same day score 1450 or more. What matters is relative scores on the test.”
“Oh! That’s scary,” Maya said.
“Which is why it’s great that Collegify’s e-learning platform gives you some idea of your percentile score. And these tests are conducted every week, so you can see how good your scores are when compared with others taking the test at the same time.”
Akshay’s mother said, “Didn’t you say you had only two minutes? You’ll go on for two hours at this rate. Let me talk.”