SHSAT study guide
SHSAT · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) is the single criterion New York City uses to admit students to eight of its nine Specialized High Schools: Bronx Science, Brooklyn Latin, Brooklyn Tech, the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, Staten Island Technical High School, and Stuyvesant. The ninth, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, admits by portfolio and audition instead. Eligibility is narrow: a student must be a New York City resident and either a current eighth grader or a first-time ninth grader who is not repeating the grade. Topics on this exam: English Language Arts and Mathematics. The SHSAT study guide has 2 sections and about 655 words.
01English Language Arts
SHSAT ELA pairs reading passages - literary, informational, and sometimes poetry - with revising-and-editing items built around a short draft. Reading questions cluster into predictable types: main idea, stated detail, inference, vocabulary in context, author's purpose, structure, and tone. Revising items test sentence boundaries, subject-verb agreement, pronoun reference, modifier placement, parallelism, transitions, and concision. The most common wrong answers are true statements that do not answer the question asked.
333 words, about 2 min02Mathematics
Math spans arithmetic (fractions, decimals, percents, ratios, proportions), algebra (linear equations and inequalities, systems, exponent rules, factoring, quadratics), geometry (angles, triangles including similarity and the Pythagorean theorem, circles, area and volume, coordinate geometry), and data (mean, median, range, counting, simple probability). About a third of the questions are grid-ins with no answer choices, so estimation and clean arithmetic matter as much as method. Percent language causes the most errors: a 25% discount followed by 8% tax is not 33%, because each percent applies to a different base. Average speed is total distance divided by total time, never the average of two speeds.
322 words, about 2 min