A small team of people committed to making the SHSAT process less mysterious and more navigable for NYC families. Independent, not affiliated with the NYC Department of Education, and honest about what we do and don't know.
SHSAT Score Calculator started as a single tool: a calculator that takes raw SHSAT scores and converts them to estimated scaled scores so families could understand what their practice test results actually meant. It grew into what you see now — a free resource covering scoring, school selection, admissions process, prep strategy, and a working adaptive practice test built on Item Response Theory.
The work is motivated by a specific problem we kept seeing: NYC families spend an estimated $50 million per year on SHSAT prep, much of it on products that don't transparently explain what they're doing, on courses that promise outcomes they can't guarantee, and on confidence in numbers nobody can verify. Some of that spending produces real value. A meaningful fraction of it wouldn't be necessary if families had access to clearer information.
We don't think we've solved this problem. We do think we've made one corner of it a little better.
Elisa is a current NYC Department of Education teacher with roughly twelve years of NYC education experience across roles at New York Edge, St. Mary's, and Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation. She reviews all editorial content on the site.
Read full bio →Fahad built and maintains the technical infrastructure of SHSAT Score Calculator, including the score conversion algorithm, the Computer Adaptive Test engine, and the site itself. He works as a digital marketing consultant and web developer.
Read full bio →A few commitments shape the editorial decisions across the site. None of them are revolutionary, but they’re worth stating because they distinguish what we do from what many SHSAT-adjacent websites do.
Every page on this site is written specifically for this site. Practice test questions are written for our pool — we don’t scrape them from prep books or other websites. Editorial content is written by named, identifiable people with public LinkedIn profiles. We use one byline (Elisa Ahmed) on technical and editorial content because she’s the person responsible for reviewing it.
The NYC DOE doesn’t publish the official SHSAT raw-to-scaled conversion table. We estimate the conversion from publicly available data, and we explain how — in our methodology page we publish the actual anchor points and the accuracy bounds. We use words like "estimated" and "approximately" when our numbers are estimated and approximate. We don’t pretend to certainty we don’t have.
Many SHSAT prep websites display made-up author credentials and invented statistics ("250,000 students helped"). We don’t. The team described on this page is real, the credentials we cite are real and verifiable through LinkedIn, and we don’t make numerical claims about user volume because we don’t collect user analytics.
Our calculator runs entirely in the browser. Your raw scores are never sent to any server. Our practice test similarly works locally — your responses, score, and any other test data stays on your device. We don’t collect email addresses, we don’t require accounts, and we don’t track individual usage. This is by design, not by accident.
We are not affiliated with the NYC Department of Education. We are not endorsed by any specialized high school. We are not paid by any prep company to favor their products. Where we mention paid resources (e.g., specific prep book publishers), we mention them by name without affiliate relationships.
We make mistakes. When readers identify them, we correct them. The methodology changelog tracks meaningful corrections so readers can see what changed and when. Email [email protected] if you find an error.
This site is an independent resource. We are not the NYC Department of Education. For the official, authoritative source on SHSAT registration, accommodations, results, and admissions, go to schools.nyc.gov and myschools.nyc. We try to keep our information current, but the official sources are always the right place for time-sensitive decisions.
We don’t offer 1-on-1 tutoring, prep coaching, or admissions consulting. We don’t respond to specific student questions about whether a particular score will get into a particular school — the calculator and school pages on the site cover this better than email correspondence would. We do read general feedback and we do welcome correction requests.
For more detail on contact channels and what we do and don’t respond to, see our contact page.
