Our mission, and honest answers

How does AceMyStates help with exam preparation?

AceMyStates gives students adaptive practice that targets the specific skills they get wrong, plus full-length exam simulators for the SHSAT and the NY State ELA and Math tests. Every question a student misses is saved to a Mistakes notebook, then re-asked days later — spaced repetition, which is one of the most reliably effective study methods there is.

Practice difficulty moves with performance: it steps up when a student is on a run, and eases when they're struggling, so nobody sits there getting hammered by questions they aren't ready for.

What is the SHSAT, and who takes it?

The SHSAT (Specialized High Schools Admissions Test) is the exam used for admission to eight of New York City's specialized public high schools, including Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. It's taken by 8th graders (and some 9th graders) each fall, and it covers English Language Arts and Math.

Admission is by score alone — there's a single composite score, and each school admits down to whatever cutoff its seats allow that year.

What score do I need for Stuyvesant or Bronx Science?

Cutoffs change every year with the applicant pool, so no one can promise you a number — but recent admissions cycles ran roughly 560 for Stuyvesant, about 517 for Bronx Science, and about 492 for Brooklyn Tech out of 800.

Inside the app, after a full practice exam, we show which schools your current estimated score would reach and how many points away the rest are. Those cutoffs are labeled with the admissions year they came from, because treating last year's number as a guarantee is how students get blindsided.

Which grades is AceMyStates for?

Grades 3 through 8. Students in grades 3–8 use it for the New York State ELA and Math tests, and students in grades 7–8 use it for SHSAT preparation. Content is filtered to the grade level on the account, so a 4th grader never gets served 8th-grade algebra.

Is AceMyStates free?

Yes — there's a free tier you can use without ever paying, including practice sessions, one free full-length exam, and the daily streak and arcade games. Paid plans (Core and Max) add longer practice sessions, more full exams per month, the Mistakes notebook with retry-by-skill, and the parent dashboard with a monthly reading plan.

There's also a family plan: one bill covers up to three children on one parent account, each with their own separate progress.

How accurate is the predicted score?

It's an estimate from practice performance, not an official score, and the app says so everywhere it appears. It becomes meaningfully useful only after a full-length exam or roughly ten adaptive sessions, and until then it stays hidden rather than showing a number built on three questions.

The real SHSAT uses equating formulas that shift year to year, which no practice tool can reproduce exactly. Treat the estimate as a direction of travel, not a prediction.

How do parents see their child's progress?

Parents get a PIN-protected dashboard plus an optional weekly email every Sunday. The dashboard shows each child separately: day streak, sessions completed, questions answered correctly, which skills they're weakest at, and what they've actually been doing in the app.

The weekly email is opt-in and off by default. No child's email is required to use the app, and nothing is shared with third parties.

Can one account be used by more than one child?

Yes — one parent account holds up to three child profiles, each with its own 4-digit PIN, streak, coins and mistake history. Siblings can't see or affect each other's progress, and the parent can move between profiles from the dashboard.

Do the games actually teach anything, or are they a distraction?

Every third question inside any arcade game is aimed at something the student personally got wrong — a real question pulled back out of their Mistakes notebook, or a drill on their weakest skill. The game tells them why they're seeing it.

Fixing a question you previously missed pays a bigger reward than answering a fresh easy one, because it's the only thing that actually evidences learning. Grinding easy questions is deliberately not the fastest way to earn.

Is my child's data safe?

We don't store passwords, we don't show ads, and we don't sell personal information. Sign-in uses a one-time emailed code, payments are handled by Stripe (we never see full card numbers), and student data is stored with row-level security so one account cannot read another's.

Full detail is in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Is AceMyStates affiliated with the NYC DOE or New York State?

No. AceMyStates is an independent test-prep app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the New York State Education Department or the NYC Department of Education. Official test information should always come from those sources directly.