brian buser March 8, 2010
We’re excited to announce that Grockit now offers personalized courses to students preparing for the SAT, ACT, GRE, and GMAT. Grockit courses offer a set schedule of live lessons with the best instructors in the country. Students pick the instructor and schedule that works best for them. Students and instructors are connected online and also through audio conferencing.
Each course lesson is a combination of slide based lecture and group practice questions. The curriculum adapts to each students’ strengths and weaknesses as they progress through the course material. Students also get 24/7 access to Grockit Group Study where they can work with or compete against students all over the world who preparing for the same exam. We’re so confident about the effectiveness of our courses that we’re offering a money back guarantee on score improvement.
Please select an exam to see how that Grockit courses compare to others in the industry:
SAT
ACT
GRE
GMAT
We look forward to your feedback!
brian buser December 2, 2009
We’re excited to announce the release of the Grockit GRE game! The GRE game offers Grockit’s full range of learning features including analytics, custom games, and access to expert tutors. The GRE measures verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing skills. It is a computer-based exam designed to assess the qualification of applicants into many graduate programs including engineering, education, psychology, and even some of the top business schools now. Jump into a GRE Game now and help welcome it to the Grockit lineup!
brian buser December 1, 2009
We are often told by users that studying in Grockit is fun. A feature users really enjoy is earning badges for their achievements. For example, when a user answers ten questions in a row correctly they earn the “Hot Streak” badge. Due to the popular demand we’ve recently added a new group of badges. Even cooler, they can also be shared into Facebook for friends to see and comment. Check them out below and let us know if you have a favorite or ideas for others. Thanks!
Hot Streak – 10 questions in a row correct:
Hot Steak – 30 questions in a row correct:
Socialite – Chats frequently in games:
Team Player – Studies with others often:
Reviewer – Frequently reviews questions:
Commentator – Frequently leaves useful comments:
Improved – Significant improvement in a subject:
100 Correct – One hundred questions answered correctly:
Well-rounded – Significant study across multiple subjects:
brian buser November 10, 2009
When students start prepping for a standardized exam a good first step is to assess ability level. Grockit students accomplish this by taking a diagnostic test shortly after they sign up. From there students need to know where to focus their study time and how they are progressing. Today, we released a feature that displays student progress over time. This new feature is best explained with an example.
The screenshot to the right shows the GMAT Achievements for a particular student. Please notice the purple badge about half-way down that indicates this student took a verbal diagnostic on 8/11/2009 and scored in the 91st percentile of all Grockit GMAT students. A score this high indicates this student has high ability in the verbal section of the GMAT exam. The next day she took a quantitative diagnostic and only scored in the 51st percentile. Knowing there was plenty of room to improve in this subject of the exam she began to focus a majority of her study time on practicing quantitative questions.
You can see that every few weeks she took a quantitative challenge to get an updated assessment of her ability level. She steadily improved all the way to the 94th percentile by time she took her last challenge.
This student should now feel confident about doing well in the quantitative section of the GMAT and may begin to balance her study time more evenly with the verbal section. This optimization of study time is of great benefit to test takers. Stay tuned to our blog to learn about future feature releases that help students in a similar way.
brian buser July 14, 2009
Grockit games can now be customized by skill tags and difficulty level. This helps you optimize your study time. Custom games are best explained with an example.
They work something like this; Sue is studying for the GMAT and her Grockit analytics indicate she needs the most improvement on Verbal questions. More specifically, Sentence Correction and Idioms give her the most trouble. Knowing this, Sue creates a custom game and selects the Sentence Correction and the Idiom skill tags to include. This creates a game which only contains these two types of questions. You can see the summary that Sue sees when she is creating the game in this picture.
In addition, Sue can adjust the difficulty level of the questions to her level of ability. In short, custom games make it easier than ever for Sue to optimize her study time and concentrate on the areas she needs the most practice.
farbood nivi July 1, 2009
We recently launched analytics and custom reviews for your performance in Grockit. Today, we are excited to update analytics for the SAT group with detailed tags and skills for the different areas of the SAT.
The SAT has three main sections and our analytics track your performance across dozens of different skills in each of the sections. Here are some examples of the skill tags we track on the different sections of the test.
Critical Reading Section - sentence correction, vocab in context, structural agreement
Math Section - functions, geometry, rational equations
Writing Section – punctuation, parallel structure, verb forms and tense
You can also use your analytics to create a custom review of that specific skill area. This can help you focus your review on the skills that need the most improvement.
We hope you enjoy this new, detailed look into your SAT practice!
brian buser June 26, 2009
If you are curious like me to know how much you remember from your high school days, create an account and play one of our SAT Diagnostics to find out. SAT Diags are a new feature we released this week and are a sampling of questions taken to determine a baseline of a student’s abilities before they begin playing games in Grockit. The diagnostic helps Grockit adapt to a student’s strengths and weaknesses and gives you a rank amongst other students.
If you don’t already have a Grockit account, you may sign in with your Facebook credentials or create a free account to play. Let us know how you do. Good luck!
arena reed June 12, 2009
Last week we began rolling out analytics and custom reviews to our groups. You’ll see the features mature over the next few weeks as we incorporate feedback from our users.
The GMAT Group is the best example of fine grained analytics. If you’ve been studying for the GMAT and you’ve attempted a significant number of questions you will be able to see your accuracy across 50+ quantitative skills and 30+ verbal skills. With this information you can identify what your weaknesses are (presuming you have any) and track your progress in those areas. You can filter by time range and difficulty; for example, you can filter to see your performance on difficult questions in the last 7 days.
SAT members currently see a smaller set of specific skills and will start to see more detail over the coming weeks.
So, I bet your thinking “Great, but what can I do with this information?”
Research* supports that getting feedback on your performance is one of the keys to learning. So play some practice SAT or GMAT games then checkout your profile to see your performance across skills.
Select the skills that you are most interested in and create a custom review of just those types of questions. Our expertly written explanations will help you gain insight into those skills.
* Research dating back to theorizing by William James‘ in his seminal book “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals”
(Angie Tombari, Grockit’s summer intern specializing in Educational Psychology collaborated on this post)
farbood nivi April 3, 2009
Grockit games can be started immediately or scheduled for later. When you RSVP to a scheduled game we used to hold your spot for the entire duration of the game regardless of whether or not you showed up. Sometimes, however, spots would be filled but the player would not show up. This in turn could prevent someone from joining a GMAT game that has available spots but is ‘full’ becauase all the spots were filled by RSVPs. To remedy this and give people more opportunities to work on GMAT questions together your reservation will now be held for the first five minutes of a game. So, if you show up to the game you RSVP’d to, no worries, you’ll get to keep your spot, but if you’re more than five minutes late to the game, your spot will be opened up for anyone to join. That anyone could be you or someone else that is in the GMAT lobby looking for people to collaborate with.
