Greg's SAT Math Tutoring Results

I wasn't as diligent as planned keeping you posted on Greg's SAT math tutoring experience. As you'll recall from this post in July we had decided to hire a tutor to help Greg raise his SAT math score into the 700's. His writing and critical reading scores were already in the 700's and 'good enough' so we wanted to focus all available time and attention on math.

The results from the October SAT test are in and I'm happy to report the tutoring helped accomplish our goal, with a 70 point improvement, and a score solidly in the 700's!

Here's a quick summary of how we chose the tutor, and my thoughts on how the tutoring process worked.

From the begining we ruled out the standard, canned SAT prep classes. These have the advantage of being easier to find and set up (and potentially less expensive), but since Greg wanted to focus on Math their broad coverage of the whole test didn't meet our needs, leading us down the tutoring path. The first decision was between a local, 'in person' tutor or one that was on-line. I checked out both options. We happened to have a Huntington Learning Center 'store' (a national tutoring chain) nearby and they had a college math teacher on staff that was willing and able to tailor a tutoring curriculum to meet our needs. I believe the cost was $65 or $75/hour. This seemed like a good option and was within our budget. There were a few other local tutoring companies that I called but didn't work out. I bet that most communities have one or more local academic tutoring services and that most of them provide some form of college test prep tutoring.

For 'online' there were many more choices, as you would imagine. Just google 'SAT Test Preparation' and you'll be overwhelmed with options. I quickly gravitated to a service called Global Scholar that I had read about as one of the new, hot online tutoring web services. Global Scholar offers tutoring on a broad array of subjects, including test prep, and provides several key benefits. First it aggregates tutors and tutoring companies from all over the world. So while I only found a couple of SAT Math tutoring options in Marietta Georgia, there are literally dozens listed on Global Scholar. Like other web-based directories the tutors on Global Scholar have detailed information describing their qualifications and user-generated ratings (thought since the service is new, there weren't many for the tutors I checked out).

A second potential benefit is that Global Scholar provides an online place to meet. You can use the system to talk live, send instant messages, share documents or write things on an electronic whiteboard. It's not quite like being in the same room with the tutor, but it's pretty close. The other benefit is that once you set up an account with Global Scholar, and enter a credit card, it takes care of all the payment and scheduling details.

Since Greg and I are both tech-saavy we were drawn to the on-line option. I liked it because of the wide selection of tutors that were available and ease with which I could research their qualifications. Greg liked it because of the convenience. It saved him the ride back and forth to the tutor and it gave us great flexibility setting up tutoring sessions.

To find out who we picked and learn about the actual tutoring experience, check back in the coming days for the second part of the story.

SAT Question of the Day

A good way to practice for the SAT test is to sign up for the College Board's SAT Question of the Day. For an investment of a few minutes every day you can become familiar with the different types of SAT questions, and of course practice getting them right.

As you can see from the image on the left I've been answering SAT questions daily for more than a year now (it really is me even though is says 'Greg', I swear!). After all this practice I bet I'd do pretty well on the SAT, even without additional test prep. I signed up to have the questions emailed to me every day, and it has become a part of my morning routine to answer them. Another way to subscribe is with an RSS feed.

If you sign up for an account with the College Board (which every student & parent should do anyway to keep up with SAT & AP test adminsitrivia, along with other helpful college admissions services available on the College Board site) it will keep a running tally of how you do answering these questions. I found this scorecard a useful motivator. I worked for many weeks to get my score up to 90% at one point. It also helps you see where extra preparation would be helpful. If I were going to take the SAT it's clear that I should spend some extra time working math problems, but could probably coast on Critical Reading. If you do sign up for an account it must be in the student's name, and the student can have only one 'official' account. As part of this official account a parent can be added on and can separately subscribe to the Question of the Day. Unfortunately (as far as I've been able to figure out) only one person can track their Question of the Day results per account. Greg didn't embrace this like I did which is why I hijacked his account to track my results.

PSAT Redux

Here's the final segment in this trilogy of posts on the PSAT.

Greg took the test Tuesday in school with the rest of the Juniors. He didn't feel like he did very well. (We'll see how good he is at self-evaluation when the scores are posted in December). I asked him why and the answer boiled down to two factors:

1. he didn't feel comfortable/confident with many of his answers
2. at lunch, after the test, he and classmates debriefed and some of his answers were different. When pressed he admitted that there was some debate among his classmates on these answers -- so Greg's weren't necessarily wrong.

My opinion is the 'uncomfortable' feeling came from not preparing enough. Several SAT prep experts I've read have emphasized the benefit of preparation over an extended period of time (months or a year (!) at the extreme). As you'll recall from the last post Greg spent a couple of days over two weekends. I think we'll learn from this when we turn our attention to preparing for his first SAT test in January.

Final PSAT Preparation

We're coming down to the wire on Greg's PSAT prep. The test is the day after tomorrow. As you may recall we bought the Kaplan PSAT book and the plan was for him to study pretty intensively for the 2-3 weekends before the test. Life got in the way and he ended up with one light weekend and one pretty solid one. He did well on the sample Kaplan test yesterday so hopefully he has prepared enough.

Since one of the reasons to take the PSAT is to qualify for the National Merit Scholarship (the other is to practice for the SAT), I was curious about how the NMS selection process is run. Greg's high school recently announced this year's Seniors who were 'commended' and 'semifinalists' from last year's test. The commended group represents the top 4% of all students and the semifinalists the top 1%. But what happens to each group from here on out? Who wins the big bucks?

Here's the page on the National Merit Scholarship site that describes the process. The summary is:

• 50,000 students are recognized out of about 1.4m total students who take the test
• 34,000 are commended. They get a pat on the back and some recognition to help enhance their college application.
• 16,000 (top ~1%) are semi-finalists. Here's a list of the cutoff score, by state, from past years needed to qualify for the semifinals (from the discusssion forum College Confidential)
• 15,000 become finalists based on grades and a written application
• 8,200 win a scholarship of some sort based on SAT scores, a written recommendation from your school and an essay you write. This is a subjective process where NSMC selectors pick the winners based on all the materials submitted.

The site is a little fuzzy on exactly how much you can win, partly because many of the awards come directly from your college or a corporation. There are some number of 'National Merit' awards of $2,500 that come directly from National Merit Scholarship Corporation. They make an overall claim that 10,500 students won $50 million last year (not sure how this jibes with the 8,200 winners mentioned above). But it sounds like on average you could win is $5,000-$6,000 if you're part of the winning group of 8-10k students.

By the way, Greg scored a 222 on his practice test. Last year the semifinalist cutoff for Georgia was 218. Hopefully he can maintain or improve upon his score -- and hopefully that Kaplan test was representative of the real thing.

Preparing for the PSAT

Greg, my Junior son, will be taking the PSAT in about three weeks. This past weekend we agreed that he's going to spend some time prep-ing between now and then.

Greg has the one sample test his high school provided, but that's all -- and it's probably not enough. So I spent some time today looking around for other PSAT prep resources.

Before I share the materials I found, here's some background on the PSAT that came up in my research.

• The PSAT doesn't count as part of your college application. Instead, one of its main purposes is to help you practice for the SAT.


• The second purpose of the PSAT is to qualify students for the National Merit Scholarship competition.

On this second point, here's an interesting post from the College Confidential discussion forum that reveals the minimum PSAT score necessary, by State, in order to qualify for National Merit consideration. In Georgia the cutoff was 215 last year. Greg got a 185 when he took the PSAT as a Sophomore. So if he wants a chance at the scholarship (and the accompanying accolades) he needs to improve his score by at least 30 points (or about 16%). That's why PSAT prep is going to be an important activity over the next several weeks.

A pretty typical way to prep for standardized college admissions tests is with a book. It's also a good way to get extra practice tests. Here's a College Confidential post that preferred the Barron's and Kaplan books over the one from Princeton Review. Here's another post that echos this and adds some other book strategies & suggestions.

Of course Amazon is the go-to resource for books and their reviews. Here are links to the Barron's and Kaplan books found there. After scanning the reviews for these (& the Kaplan '07 book) my conclusion was that it was pretty close to a toss-up between the two of them. We had used the Kaplan book last time successfully, and Kaplan sponsored a free SAT practice test at Greg's High School, so that's what I ordered tonight from Amazon. With the Kaplan book we'll get 400+ pages of tips, tricks and three practice tests. This should be enough -- especially give there are only two weekends left until the test.

If a book sounds like overkill, or you don't want to spend the money, there are two free on-line options for practice questions I found. The College Board offers a pretty light weight intro to the PSAT service with an overview of the test and about 35 sample questions. This should take less than an hour to digest and might be a good way to get the reluctant student underway with his/her prep work. There's another general purpose College Admissions site called Peterson's that offers a free (full-sized) on-line PSAT practice test. All you need to access it is a quick on-line registration. I signed up and verified that there weren't any hidden costs, but I didn't actually try the test. Please leave a comment with your reaction to this tool if you end up trying it.

Finally, if all you want is to order past individual PSAT tests (the actual ones), the College Board sells them for $3 each, and they're available at Amazon for $5+. What's unclear to me is whether these come with answer keys or answer explanations. A quick call to the College Board would probably clarify that.

The consensus of my research seems to be that formal test prep courses for the PSAT aren't 'worth it' But if you want to take a course and there's not one in your neighborhood, Peterson's also offers an on-line PSAT Prep Course for $85. Again, I haven't tried this so please leave a comment if you do.

If you or your student is about to take the PSAT, best of luck prep-ing and when you take the test.