Success Stories

Success Stories

Andrew – SHSAT
Andrew was great kid who wanted to go Stuyvesant High School. Andrew did well in school, was exceptionally bright, and interviewed well, and there was no way he was getting into Stuyvesant. His SHSAT scores were too low. The SHSAT has 100 questions, and to get into Stuyvesant, you need to answer around 92 correctly. The first mock exam Andrew took he scored a 71.

So we looked at Andrew’ work, and we watched as he answered questions. On the math section, he was cocky. Math had always come easy to him, and so he was careless, and the test takes advantage of that. On reading comp, he was lazy. He thought the passages were boring, so he didn’t focus. And the result was a 71.

And so we worked with Andrew. On the math sections, we showed him exactly how the test was tricking him, and how to avoid it. We gave him question after question that made him slow down and write down his work. For reading comp, we went through the passages line by line. We gave him mock exams and problem sets. He never stopped complaining that the reading passages were boring, but he read them carefully. And slowly, his scores improved. His next mock exam he got an 83, followed by a 92, followed by a 97.

Andrew is a senior at Stuyvesant this year. He’s loved his time there.

Talia – SAT
Talia scored well below her potential on her first SAT mock exam. Her math and grammar scores were surprisingly low, and her essay was especially bad. She did what a lot of good writers and good thinkers do: she tried to get too deep. It’s almost impossible to go in depth in twenty-five minutes, and it usually leads to poor essays.

We went through how the test was tricking her and what she needed to do to improve. While she did well in math at school, she was not prepared for the types of math questions on the SAT. The same was true of her grammar: she needed to learn the how to handle questions specific to the SAT. For the essay, she was having difficulty thinking of examples, so we spent time writing practice outlines. We gave her a topic and she had eight minutes to think of two examples. We did this three times per session, until Talia could give us four examples for both sides of any essay topic we gave her.

Talia was an extremely hard worker, and she learned from her mistakes. She took the SAT only once, in November of her junior year. She scored over 2300 – an increase of over 300 points from her mock. The rest of her junior year she could concentrate on school as she watched her friends study for their SATs.

Aaron – ISEE
Aaron was an Israeli student who had moved to New York four years prior. He was studying for his ISEE. Aaron did not test well on his mock exam in any section. His math was especially bad, which confused his parents since he did well in math at school.

We cannot stress the following point enough: school math and test math are different. Depending on the school and the teacher, you can get an “A” on a school math test without ever understanding the topic or being able to apply it beyond the exact type of questions your teacher has given you. You cannot do this on a standardized test. Standardized tests demand that you understand math well enough to apply your knowledge to new question-types.

To make things more difficult, English was not Aaron’s first language, nor did he speak English at home. We put him on a steady diet of vocabulary and reading, and we really concentrated on math. Aaron’s fundamentals were weak, so we had to shore up the holes in his knowledge. In addition, the language in the math questions was giving him trouble. His father would help him with his math, but they would go over the problems in Hebrew. So we asked Aaron’s father if he would speak English when helping his son with his math homework. He agreed.

Aaron was getting better, but he was still having trouble in math with problem recognition and timing. As the test approached, we gave Aaron problem sets of twelve questions. He had fifteen minutes to finish each problem set. For the final two and a half weeks before the exam, he did a problem set every day.

Aaron crushed the ISEE. He scored an 8 in the Verbal Reasoning Section – not bad for a kid whose first language isn’t English and who doesn’t speak English at home. Aaron got into every high school to which he applied.

Rob – SSAT
Rob was a very bright kid with a lot of potential but not a lot of focus or motivation. He tested in the 40% on his practice SSAT. Rob was very good at reading comprehension but not good at verbal reasoning and definitely not good at math. He had the potential; he just wasn’t using it.

Rob made a lot of comments about how he was a terrible test-taker and wasn’t good in math, so our first order of business was to change his poor attitude. If you do not believe you can do well, you probably won’t do well. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or cannot, you are always right.”

The above belief – that the most important point is to believe you can do it – is not new age mumbo-jumbo. These tests have a lot of questions that look difficult but are actually pretty easy to answer. Students who think they are going to fail do not try on difficult questions. They give up. Students who think they will succeed work through difficulty. It’s not a matter of brains; it’s a matter of effort.

Rob was not a terrible test-taker; he was just careless and unmotivated. His math was bad, but he was far from hopeless. It took a while, but Rob finally started working hard. He took four mock exams, with varying success. We realized as the test approached that on many days, Rob ate almost nothing but desserts. So we worked on changing his diet, as well. It wasn’t easy, but Rob entered the test feeling confident.

Rob demolished the SSAT. He scored in the 84th percentile. It was an amazing improvement from his first mock exam.

Sally – SAT
Sally was very good at math but terrible at reading comprehension. She read a good deal outside of school, so at first we were confused as to why she was scoring so poorly. And then we watched her work. As Sally went through reading comprehension questions on the SAT, she tried to make every answer choice right. She would make strange and complicated connections to prove that an answer could work. She was wasting time and scoring poorly.

So we adjusted the way Sally approached the questions. No longer would she try to find the right answer, she would now try to find four wrong answers. It took a while, and Sally – who let us know she did not like reading comprehension – wasn’t too thrilled about the sessions. But her score increased dramatically. She increased her total score over 250 points and is now a sophomore at Cornell.

Jake – ISEE
Jake was a lazy student who went to a school that didn’t make him work hard. As a result, he was awful at standardized tests and had a poor work ethic. He was taking the ISEE and needed help in every section. He needed a full review of math, as there were many basic math concepts he never learned. In addition, he was sloppy in his work.

Jake was a difficult student because he did not think he could do well on the ISEE and didn’t like to work. But we kept at it, and with about a month to go before the exam, Jake finally started working hard. He still hated being tutored, and he told us this fact often, but he tried.

Jake did pretty well on the exam. He got a 6 in verbal reasoning, which was a surprise to everyone, and he scored a 9 and a 6 in the math sections. He got into his first choice high school and loves it.

Alice – SAT
Alice had a lot of anxiety about not doing well on the exam, and it manifested in a bad attitude. Inwardly, she felt that if she didn’t try, she wouldn’t be a failure. So she didn’t work hard for the first month we worked with her. In addition, Alice had heard misinformation about the way colleges view SAT scores.

Her tutor figured out what was going on, and she let Alice know that trying hard and failing was infinitely better than not trying and failing. It took a while to sink in, but it finally did. Alice started working hard and stopped fearing doing poorly.

She improved her score by 280 points.

Dan – ISEE
Dan needed mostly math help for the ISEE. He had scored poorly on the math sections of his mock exam and was not coming close to finishing either section. We realized that he was spending an inordinate amount of time on the questions he didn’t understand, and as a result, wasn’t finishing the section. Every question on the ISEE is worth one point, whether it’s the easiest or the hardest. It didn’t make sense for Dan to spend five minutes on one question and not get to questions he could have answered. We advised him to skip any question he didn’t know until the end.

This strategy not only saved Dan time, but it allowed him to spend his mental energy more productively. He was getting frustrated, and wearing himself out, spending five minutes on question number 18 in a 35 question section. With his new approach, he did the questions he was best at solving when he was fresh and most focused.

With that strategy, and with hard work and tutoring, Dan raised his math scores from 5s to 7s. He is currently applying to private schools in the city.