Free vs Paid SAT Prep

While there are many useful free resources online, the structure and content of these are fairly shallow. YouTube channels, tips and tricks offered all over social media, are helpful! But there is a limit. You will likely plateau below the score you’d like to achieve or already know everything they have to offer. To substantially raise a low score or go from a 1500 to a 1600 takes specialized understanding of the test and a teacher to interact with the individual student to recognize why exactly the student got the question wrong.

There are many reasons why a student can get a question wrong on the SAT: content knowledge, not knowing how to approach the problem, time pressure, misreading, or underprocessing. A lack of content knowledge is the easiest problem to fix and the focus of free resources. If you’ve never learned what a clause is and what makes it independent vs dependent, then learning that will help improve your score. Some free resources might even teach you an “approach” or two but it can be easy to mistake a procedure or hack for an approach so be careful.

An approach empowers you to know when and how to apply a procedure.

A procedure or a hack are things you follow without really understanding why it works, you just know that it does.

For example, an approach might be to translate English sentences into a math equation. A procedure is replace “of” with “x”. If you just know the procedure and not the approach you can use the procedure incorrectly. While free resources can help you learn some content and get familiar with using a few procedures, deeper understanding contained in approaches and how to solve issues like misreading, underprocessing, and time pressure are things that aren’t as generalizable and take a teacher time with a student to help identify and solve.