Award-Winning Private SAT Tutoring in North Chicago, IL

"We reviewed the sections from practice test #1 that the student completed on his own: the essay, a reading section, and a math section. He timed himself on these (like I had asked him to), and it was clear that his biggest challenge was time management. Although his essay had a strong thesis, he only completed two paragraphs and admitted that he ran out of time while writing. We discussed ways to plan his essay more efficiently and focus more on supporting his thesis with a specific example or two rather than generalizations. His performance on the reading section was noticeably poor - he only completed about 2/3 of the questions and answered many incorrectly. However, we determined that this was also largely a function of running out of time, since he got most of the passage-based reading questions correct without help when we went over them together. His performance on sentence completion questions was poorer even when given more time, largely because he didn't know many of the vocabulary words being tested. I encouraged him to skip the harder sentence completion questions in favor of spending more time on the passage-based questions, of which there are more in each reading section. He did very well on the math section, getting only one incorrect and skipping five. We reviewed the problems he missed, and I reminded him of techniques he could use to answer these quickly and correctly. Since we cancelled last Wednesday's session, we scheduled another session for tomorrow morning (Saturday) from 10-12 at the library. He is not expected to do any practice between now and tomorrow morning, but I have asked him to complete a FULL practice test before our sessions next week. He says he plans to do this on Sunday. I'll reiterate the importance of the practice test at tomorrow's session."

"The student and I reviewed algebra and continued to work on understanding the conflict in Afghanistan for his World History class. "