Location: New York City
Starting SAT Score: 490M, 520V
Final SAT Score: 700M, 710V
College: Tulane
When I first met Brian both he and his father were convinced that the ACT was the right test for him, but after talking to Brian and watching him do some SAT and ACT questions I felt very confident that he would do much better on the SAT. He was a little weak on content and had serious time issues, both things that would have hurt him on the ACT. But he was also very clever and had great creative problem solving ability and I knew that with the right guidance he would do extremely well on the SAT since those are the exact qualities that the SAT tends to reward.
His first diagnostic was very low, but he pretty quickly learned how to be more strategic on questions and we slowly but surely worked on the content weaknesses that he had. Unfortunately Brian was not the hardest worker and it was very difficult to get him to do the kind of work outside of our sessions that would have allowed him to achieve a greater level of content mastery. Luckily we had enough meetings together that we were largely able to cover that together and in the end he achieved a phenomenal score increase.
That said, Brian was probably capable of scoring even higher – his biggest issues were the content weaknesses that he was never really willing to address on his own and that ultimately prevented him from going any higher. Even after many months of work together there were Math issues that he never completely mastered, so his Math score essentially hit a ceiling. But Brian scored well above what he was expecting to score so in the end he was extremely satisfied with how he had done and indeed he had an amazing score that he could be very proud of.