How To Pick A Tutor

When picking a tutor, course, or program to help you prepare for the SAT you should look for these green flags.

Practice like you want to perform: When looking for a tutor, program, or course, make sure they are incorporating the free practice tests Collegeboard has on the Bluebook App that run exactly like a real test. They are the best predictor of how you will do on the test and your scores should be improving. If your scores aren’t improving, something has gone wrong.

Identify problem types: A great tutor will structure your learning, not just have you do a million practice problems. The test covers a lot of content but there are only a handful of concepts and a handful of approaches you need. If you master these concepts and approaches then you’ll be able to identify the problem types and getting questions right will be easy from there. Make sure you find someone who is helping you apply approaches that help you solve question types, not just individual questions.

Understand WHY and HOW: When looking for a tutor they should be able to identify WHY you got a question wrong and teach you HOW to get it right. They should be able to explain HOW they knew what to do to get the right answer and WHY what they did worked.

While these green flags might be hard to find, there are some easy-to-identify red flags. If your program, tutor, or course asks you to do any of these, run.

Why shouldn’t I memorize formulas?

Memory is important to learning and it is great to remember what you’ve learned. But remembering and memorizing are not the same thing. Under stress, it is easy to forget formulas and easy to misapply things you’ve memorized. Whereas if you’ve understood how a formula is derived and it makes sense to you, then it should feel easy to remember. Ex. I remember my where I live, but I’ve memorized my address. If you’ve understood the concept a question is testing, it should feel easy to solve. It will always feel hard if you’ve memorized it.

Why is relying on my calculator bad?

If you find yourself relying on your calculator then you are in procedure mode, not approach mode. If you are in procedure mode when solving a problem, you’ll miss details as you blindly follow the steps and choose a wrong answer put there to trap students using procedures. If you are in approach mode, you’ll be curious about what the question is asking and learn things as you go and find that you’ve discovered the answer without even trying. You barely need your calculator on the SAT. We promise. If you are feeling like you “need” your calculator to solve it, there is likely an easier and quicker way to get the right answer that you are missing.

Why shouldn’t I try to eliminate wrong answers?

If you eliminate wrong answers that will take you three times as long as knowing what the right one looks like. Before looking at the answer choices you should already have in mind what the right answer will contain. This will prevent you from getting confused by correct but irrelevant details. Believe in yourself. You are smart enough to know what the right answer looks like.

Why shouldn’t I keep taking tests and finding more practice problems?

If you are doing lots of work and keep making the same mistakes you aren’t learning. If you keep doing practice tests and get around the same scores you aren’t learning. You won’t get better by reading over the right answers after you’ve gotten the wrong answer. You need a different approach. Work smarter, not harder. Focus on identifying problem types. Understand WHY you got the question wrong and HOW to get it right next time.

Why is watching people solve problems not helpful?

Watching people ride a bike doesn’t teach you how to ride a bike. You learn how to keep your balance by being supported with you on the bike. When you watch other people solve problems you think it’s easy and so clear, but then when you try you don’t know how they knew what to do. A great tutor supports your learning by getting you to articulate your internal strategy for solving problems and helps you find where you fall off and teaches you to self correct. Just because they know how to do the problems doesn’t mean they know how to teach you how to solve problems on your own.