Q: What is UIL and what does it stand for?
UIL stands for University Interscholastic League. UIL is a non-profit organization that organizes and supervises competitions on statewide and regional levels throughout the state of Texas. As the largest interschool organization of its kind, UIL provides opportunity for character building through fair competition among students who wish to excel outside of the classroom. Hexco produces academic study guides, tests, and products that support most areas of UIL academic competition. Hexco’s president, Linda Tarrant is the State Contest Director for UIL Computer Applications. The official UIL website can be found at http://www.uiltexas.org/academics.
Q: Can a parent/grandparent buy study materials for their student if the school doesn’t?
All of our products are available to both schools and individuals including our UIL products. We recommend that students who are interested in competing in UIL academics study from older tests to familiarize themselves with the overall “feel” of the type of UIL test they will be taking. Students who study with actual “retired” tests may also gain a better understanding of the time constraints they will be given at the actual meet. Search UIL Practice Packets on our website, or contact us for further information.
Q: What is the difference between UIL Practice Packet 1 and UIL Practice Packet 2?
Several contests in UIL are based on new material annually, such as Literary Criticism, Social Studies, and Spelling. For these contests, we prepare a packet of practice tests for use in studying for each of these contests called Practice Packet 1. This is generally available early in the fall, and these each have six practice tests that are formatted like the invitational tests that we offer for meets in the fall and spring. During the fall months, we produce six invitational tests that are used at meets, and in early January we bind these six tests together to produce Practice Packet 2 for each of these contests. This gives students additional study materials in preparation for the various spring meets.
Q: What is the difference between "UIL Spelling eMentor" and "UIL Spelling/Vocab eMentor"?
The Spelling eMentor is a program that allows students to practice spelling words in a given collection, such as the UIL high school Word Power list, the 3rd and 4th grade list from A+ Spelling book, the 5th and 6th grade list from the A+ book, or the 7th and 8th words from A+. This is our interactive program to teach spellings of word, enable a student to concentrate on words difficult for him or her, and ultimately master all the words in the list. For each word, a student hears the word pronounced while viewing the phonetic pronunciation(s), definition, parts of speech, and sometimes a sentence for the word. For the high school list, the words marked for vocabulary study are indicated with an "*" so students will realize that these are the words for which they will need to know the definitions. Each vocabulary word also presents the etymology of the word, and these can be studied selectively to learn their spellings and study dictionary information on each word.
The UIL Spelling/Vocabulary eMentor presents only the words marked for vocabulary study in the UIL Word Power list. Questions are presented in a multiple-choice format. This product contains only the 350 words for which a student is responsible for definitions and etymology. Order our UIL spelling & Vocabulary eMentor to get started now.