My daughter is in 7th grade and we just started looking into the specialized high schools for next fall. Honestly I had no idea how competitive this whole process was until her teacher mentioned it last month. We're kind of late to the game — most kids in her class have apparently been prepping since 5th grade, which, wow.
She took a shsat practice test last week just to get a baseline and scored around 480. From what I can tell with the shsat score calculator on a few different sites, that's not going to get her into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science, but maybe one of the lower-cutoff schools? We've been doing the SHSAT English Practice Test sections together in the evenings and her reading comp is actually pretty solid — it's the scrambled paragraphs that are killing her.
Has anyone been through this recently? How many hours a week did your kid actually study? And is the test nav shsat practice test on the DOE website worth using, or should we be looking at outside prep? Any advice from parents who've done this would be really appreciated.