Locust Valley, NY
Starting SAT Score: 540M 510V
Final SAT Score: 700M, 710V
College: Boston University
David started at a pretty low level and ultimately achieved a near 600 point increase! When I first met with David it was clear that he was ultimately likely to do far better than he had on his first diagnostic since he appeared to be very intelligent and yet was doing a lot of things wrong on the test. On the Math section he was approaching the questions in a textbook manner as though they were testing his Math knowledge, the way the tests that he had taken in High School tended to do. But once I demonstrated for him that SAT questions were more aimed at testing his creative problem solving ability, and once he learned some of the techniques that he could apply, he quickly jumped way up on the scoring scale.
Similarly, on the Reading section he was doing a lot wrong. He was underlining almost everything in the passage and was reading for details not for purpose and function. Again he quickly improved on Reading Comprehension. On the Writing section his issues were more content related, so we spent a lot of time going through the grammar issues that he tended to struggle with on the test. David was also a pretty hard working student, so I was able to have him do homework assignments that really reinforced the content that he was lacking both on the Writing section and the Math section.
After David achieved the stellar scores that he got on the SAT, he decided to try his hand at the ACT. The transition was fairly easy for him because he didn’t really have time management issues and was naturally good at Science. The biggest transition was learning the additional content that is tested on the Math and English sections of the ACT, but between covering that in our sessions and doing some additional work outside of our meetings, he managed to pick it up pretty quickly. His practice test scores indicated that he was likely to do as well or better on the ACT as he had on the SAT, but unfortunately the scores he got on the actual ACT were a bit below the already fantastic scores that he had achieved on the SAT so in the end he decided to just stick with his stellar SAT scores and not pursue the ACT further.