Award-Winning SAT Tutors serving Cambridge

The student has been doing very well in tutoring sessions. We started off with a math section, where she answered all but one correctly, without needing any assistance. We then did two sentence completion sections, again adding to her vocabulary list. We ended with a long single reading passage, where she answered all of the questions correctly, and with a 10-minute discussion of the essay. We looked at an essay prompt, and I guided her toward very specific examples and analysis. Her homework was to finish the essay prompt (by writing the essay) and to study her vocabulary.

The student and I worked on the Math section today. She is scoring very high (670 on the practice and upper-600s on the practice section we did today), but she's worried about her consistency. We'll try to identify patterns in the questions she's missing to boost her to the 700 range. After that we'll look at the other sections.

The student and I continued our work preparing her for the ACT. We are beginning to work back in all the elements of the ACT in each lesson. For next week, we'll complete this by also taking a fresh look at her essays.

The student finished most of practice test #2 (scoring 13/20 on math, 22/49 on critical reading, and 17/35 in writing). We went through her incorrect answers in the writing section and continued on writing for the entire session, working through strategies and tips on recognizing errors. She seems to pick up quickly on the writing section. We rounded out the session by working on some creative writing for the essay, including coming up with concrete examples for abstract ideas. I assigned practice test #3 and the essay from test #2 (which she didn't complete) for her to complete before our next session.

The subjects we covered today were SAT essay writing and a bit of Math. We first went over the student's homework, which she did a really good job with. Next we talked about the SAT essay on a basic level €” structure, preparation, timing and what the readers are looking for as far as scoring guidelines. We went through some examples of passive/active voice and read over some sample essays. Next, we did two sample outlines so with a thesis, two examples and a conclusion. I also had her write one essay. For math, we did a timed drill where we did one section and timed each question to get a sense of pace and to help her start understanding when she should skip a specific question and come back to it.

The student's English homework shows definite improvement, and the errors seemed to be more in tricky questions/ edge cases than in any specific category, which is great. Today, we spent most of our time talking about the reading test, practicing reading and annotating passages, and doing practice questions. He made a good effort to stay with them and practice annotating them. For Sunday, his first priority is completing the last 3 passages in the reading section of practice test 1. I'd also like him to complete the essay work from Sunday: read and annotate the passage, brainstorm essay topics, create a rough outline, and read the example essays and skim their score explanations, comparing those to his outline. If he has time, there are a couple passages that I'd like him to read and annotate for practice.