Our step-by-step method makes the difference.

Early on in my ACT/SAT prep career, while most of my students were enjoying significant increases in their scores, there were a few who didn’t see the same results. Often, they were performing well in our sessions together and even on their homework, but they underperformed on test day. I asked myself: What is going wrong? After considering that question for a few minutes, I had to admit that I didn’t know because I wasn’t sure exactly what was going through their head on the questions they had missed.

At that point, I resolved to change the way I taught, to focus less on what was on the test and focus more on how to take the test. I sat down to take a practice test myself, and I wrote down exactly the step-by-step process that I used to answer each question on each section of the test. From then on, before I taught my students any new math, grammar, science, or reading skills, I taught them first how to approach the test properly, making sure that they followed the right steps exactly.

These step-by-step processes incorporated all of the most effective tips, strategies, and hacks that the student might find in another tutoring program or workbook, but the benefit was that following these steps ensured best practices automatically, without having to give it much thought at all.

The results were incredible immediately. My higher-performing students improved even further, and my students who had stagnated rose above their plateaus. The scores were higher, the results were more consistent, the students’ reported feeling much more confident/much less test anxiety, and they were moving through the test more efficiently, taking less time to complete each problem/section. My students almost without exception have experienced these benefits ever since, and I have fine-tuned the steps over many years to help students even more quickly and effectively grasp how to take the ACT/SAT step by step.

This step-by-step philosophy is used in both our ACT/SAT Prep Program and College Essay Program.