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.

Announcing Major Summer App Update

We successfully deployed our most complex update ever to the Piqosity application on Thursday, June 13, 2024. These are the biggest changes existing users should be aware of: A New Student Questionnaire helps to orient students when they first log in. The Student Dashboard has been completely reimagined. Piqosity Virtual Tutor 2 (PVT [...]

By |2024-08-26T15:45:34-05:00June 5th, 2024|Piqosity News|

College Admissions Interview Tips from the Interviewer

College admissions interviews are an opportunity for students to talk to an alumnus 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 |2024-04-30T11:01:57-05:00April 18th, 2024|College Resources|

How Long Should You Study for the Digital SAT Test?

Every student, parent, and school administrator always asks us, “how long does it take to improve an ACT or SAT score?” Asked to anyone else, the generic response that you’ll usually get for this admittedly broad question is “experts say about 10-20 hours.” But who are these experts and what does that mean? Can [...]

By |2024-08-22T11:58:38-05:00February 8th, 2024|SAT Test Prep|

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 |2024-05-30T16:29:51-05:00January 23rd, 2024|ISEE Test Prep|

How Long Should You Study for the ACT Test?

Every student, parent, and school administrator always asks us, “how long does it take to improve an ACT or SAT score?” Asked to anyone else, the generic response that you’ll usually get for this admittedly broad question is “experts say about 10-20 hours.” But who are these experts and what does that mean? Can [...]

By |2024-09-09T16:19:56-05:00January 8th, 2024|ACT Test Prep|

How to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills for Standardized Tests Like ACT and SAT

English teachers will often tell you that the only way to improve your reading comprehension skills is to simply read more. While sound and well-intentioned, this advice probably isn’t very helpful if you must quickly improve your skills, for example earning a higher score on a standardized test like the ISEE, ACT or SAT. [...]

By |2024-09-09T16:19:44-05:00January 3rd, 2024|ACT Test Prep, English, 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 requires students to know more advanced concepts and work more quickly. Our experience working with thousands of students over the last 18 years is [...]

By |2024-09-19T14:14:43-05:00January 3rd, 2024|ACT Test Prep, SAT Test Prep|

App Update to Teacher Assignments

Happy holidays from all of us at Piqosity! This morning our engineering team deployed a major update to the very popular Assignments feature whereby teachers can create assignments with both lessons and questions for students with due dates. We completely rewrote the backend code to improve performance and updated the user interface to be [...]

By |2024-08-22T11:53:58-05:00December 28th, 2023|Piqosity News|
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