I care because of what I’ve been through personally. I have dedicated most of my life towards teaching and coaching others. Everything I’ve done in my life has continued to bring me back to helping teens. I’ve actually been tutoring most of my life–since I was 8. When I was a teenager I didn’t have anyone to show me the way to succeed in school, get into a top university, and succeed when I got there. I figured it out on my own as I went along. Tutoring was a constant theme as I went through school. I taught all the way through some of the top universities and graduated, after paying my way through four degrees over fourteen years, with no debt.

I want to help teens during their pivotal high school years to emerge with a clear vision forward to navigate the opportunities that will open up for them with a solid college education. I want to help teens prevent unnecessary pain through trial and error, sooner rather than later, because I know what a difference those years can make in terms of life decisions and opportunities. The college admissions climate is so different than it was when we went to college. We took the SAT once or twice, perhaps referring to a review book if we were particularly diligent.  That’s all anybody did, even at top private schools.

Now, with so many students vying for so few spots, things are completely different, and SAT preparation is the new normal. It’s easy for parents to become overwhelmed. Some parents think the best thing is to just let their kids take it cold and see how they do. In the process they sacrifice important test dates and valuable test prep time, putting their kids at a disadvantage in the college admissions process. Also, in addition to the many new academic and extracurricular demands, there are too many test prep companies happy to take your money to enroll your child in SAT prep classes and send your kids home with a bag of books–but often little more. Prep companies know that you, as a parent, will never attend the class, and never really know what’s going on in the class (and probably don’t want to). They know you’ll just pay, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.

In this context, it’s important to recognize that buying test prep does not guarantee success, and obviously you can’t simply buy test scores. You also have to be aware of the minefield out there of partial and inefficient solutions–or even outright scams. There are a lot of prep programs out there that use inferior materials, with poorly trained teachers who teach out of a manual, in inflexible and undifferentiated classes, and that have little regard or attention for your particular teen’s individual situation or needs.

Some programs give the appearance of challenging kids by simply overwhelming them with material, like wasting your teen’s time with having them to memorize hundreds or even thousands of unnecessary vocabulary words. Many popular and big name test companies even make up their own exams to teach students, who then go in and are surprised and confused to find out that the exam they studied for is not the one being tested. They “guarantee” that if kids don’t get even a modest improvement they will even let those students waste their time and repeat the same failed class, at the same lumbering pace. The cost of running these SAT prep classes with poorly trained instructors is so low, budget prep companies can afford to do that.