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5. What factors are not measured by an abilities assessment? Abilities assessments do not result in grades, and they do not reflect class standing or general intelligence. Abilities assessments are designed, instead, to get at the student’s core strengths and to define him or her in terms that guide him to success and happiness in life and career.

6. When should a high school student complete an abilities assessment? Scientists have determined that a child’s natural abilities mature and are ready to be tested at any time after the age of fifteen. The sooner after that age your child is tested, the sooner he or she can take advantage of the insights the test provides into good study and learning habits, as well as into the selection of the right college and career.

7. The Highlands Ability Battery sounds complex and the results hard to understand and interpret. How do you help my child to know what the results mean? First of all, your child gets a detailed 32-page report which includes a bar chart and a discussion of the test results and their meaning. Further, the Highlands Company has trained and certified more than 225 Affiliates to interpret the report. Many of these Affiliates have qualified as Student Counselors. Each of the Student Counselors has been assigned a full page on the Highlands Student Center, www.HighlandsStudentCenter.com . The student selects a Counselor, who leads him or her through a two-hour personalized feedback conference.

8. Students grow and change over time; do their abilities change as they grow? No, abilities as we define them are stable and develop naturally until the age of 14 or 15. At that point, they remain, essentially unchanged, throughout the rest of life. Skills can be added and style can be modified, but natural abilities are constant and immutable.

9. Do the results of an abilities assessment help the student to define the ideal college learning environment? Yes. A college’s learning environment is determined by its size, the size of its classes, the ratio of faculty to student, its housing arrangements, the size and scope of its library, its eating arrangements, etc. Most critical is the college’s commitment to particular courses, as, for example, to History or Political Science as opposed to the sciences or engineering. The assessment will tell you whether your child is a generalist or a specialist, an introvert or an extrovert, as well as how he or she learns best. All of these will tell us what college environment will enable the student to prosper and grow.