SAT Prep

My first experiences as an SAT tutor began when I was in high school. I was always pretty good at standardized testing even though I never took any kind of SAT prep class or read any SAT books, and I guess somehow I developed a reputation as a guy who was good at the SAT.

In those days my tutoring technique was pretty unrefined and informal: other students would come find me at lunch or after school and ask me how to get better at taking the SAT or the PSAT, and we would look at some SAT practice questions together and kind of talk things through. I guess this kind of laid-back “SAT tutoring” helped some people, because I was getting asked for SAT help more and more frequently.

(Back then I didn’t have any kind of fully thought-out system or anything, because I hadn’t analyzed the SAT as thoroughly as I have now–it wasn’t my full-time occupation when I was in school, and I had other stuff like classes, IB, and extra-curriculars on my teen-aged mind. But, even back then, I realized that guessing on the SAT was a really bad SAT strategy, and I realized that real SAT practice questions from the College Board were absolutely essential if people wanted to get better scores without wasting their time on the wrong ideas.)

In college I mostly forgot about SAT prep because people in college tend not to care about the SAT that much, as you might imagine. But one day, when I was a junior, I was looking for a job and I saw an ad that said Kaplan was hiring SAT instructors. I though that would be right up my alley, so I applied and they hired me after a pretty lengthy audition process. I went through weeks of training in the Kaplan methods, and one thing stood out to me pretty clearly: Kaplan’s ideas about the SAT and my ideas were extremely different. Kaplan taught people to guess, and it taught them to memorize SAT vocabulary, and it gave them drills for math questions and all kinds of things like that. So I left Kaplan after teaching a couple of courses, because I didn’t like teaching my students SAT strategies I didn’t believe in.

After Kaplan I mostly forgot about SAT tutoring for a couple of years, until my brother needed help with his SAT score. We sat down and worked together a little bit, and his scores went up hundreds of points, allowing him to get the scholarship he needed (his major problem was making careless errors, and I showed him how to correct those).

I guess word got around to his friends, because they started coming over to my house and asking for test prep help on a pretty regular basis. It got to the point where I would come home from work and find high school students waiting for my SAT advice 3 or 4 days a week.

But this time around, things were different from when I was in high school. I still kept my conversations with my students relaxed and easy, but I had
started to think about the SAT in a much more thorough and systematic way. My college training in linguistics led me to see the SAT in terms of systems, rules, patterns, and standards that could be identified and exploited; my time spent fencing in college led me to see the SAT as a strategic tool developed by the College Board for a specific purpose, with specific advantages and disadvantages.

This was when I began really unlocking the test. I realized that standardized tests can never measure exactly what they claim to be measuring because the requirements of the multiple-choice format make that impossible.

Once I started looking at the test that way, I understood it in a whole new light. My students were able to achieve significant success with relatively little effort. Increasing demand for my SAT tutoring services led me to write test prep books, offer tutoring over the phone, and create an SAT video course. Leaders in the college admissions field and teachers across America sought me out for partnerships.

Over the years, I’ve also come to undestand that every student has a unique set of abilities, interests, and limitations that influence his approach to the SAT (and to everything else, really). I’m always working on reaching out to my students, diagnosing their test-taking issues, and finding ways to motivate them to make the biggest possible improvements in the least possible time.

When I explain things in my online SAT course videos or in the SAT forum in that course, I’m always thinking about the different types of students I’ve encountered in my years of tutoring; I always do my best to explain things so that every student will be able to understand what I mean, and I always do my best to search out methods of delivering my SAT instruction what will reach out to learners of all types.

The result of all of this is my online SAT video course. If you’d like to learn more about it, please fill in your email in the box above, and we’ll get started right away with a free lesson on writing the SAT Essay.