Frequently Asked Questions

How long have you been teaching?

Elizabeth has been tutoring since 2003 and has published the books Outsmarting the SAT and Acing the ACT with Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Crown/Penguin Random House. Everyone on the team (save for our current Yalie) has more than ten years' experience.

Do you only do test prep or do you also offer general tutoring?

Yes, we offer academic coaching and coursework tutoring for almost all middle school and high school level subjects and students of all levels. We are also available for some college level courses, including college writing, politics, sociology, philosophy, calculus, and physics.

What kind of students do you usually work with?

We work with students from all over the world with every imaginable background. We have had students from all over the United States, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Palm Beach, and Aspen, as well as from places like Argentina, Venezuela, Greece, U.K., Sweden, Kuwait, and China. Some are the children of diplomats and celebrities; others are students at boarding schools and private parochial schools. We have had students who are vying for places on the U.S. Olympic team, artists, and students who just like to hang out with competitive types. Whether they're from prominent American families, they're international students hoping for the American university experience, or they're students navigating public schools and shooting for scholarships and honors colleges, our students have two big things in common: they love to improve and they appreciate instructors who are down to earth.

Do you have experience with ADD/ADHD and learning differences?

We have extensive experiences with students who display all sorts of learning differences, be those attention disorders like ADD/ADHD, post-concussive syndrome, or more complicated processing issues of the sort that surface on a complete psycho-educational evaluation. We know how to make an I.E.P. work for students. We've also been known to identify for students their particular strengths and weaknesses in ways that make them feel more confident and equipped to navigate the world as they are.

Our team includes a psychologist who specializes in psychometric evaluation who is available for consultation at any time. We have also worked with at-risk students and have even home schooled students who have been withdrawn from school for behavioral reasons. We're ready to take on any challenge.

What's your privacy policy like?

We don't share our client list. Period.

We wish we could. We’ve met some interesting people.

What makes a bad fit for students to work with you?

It's an extremely rare day when something doesn't go as planned around here, but we've found the most challenging situations happen when students categorically refuse to work independently (when they're purposefully throwing the game because they genuinely do not want to go to college or see no reason to) or when we're unable to define a reasonable goal that the student, tutor, and parents all understand and agree on.

If you’re amenable to cheating, we probably aren’t your people.

What if I'm naturally just bad at math?

Sometimes some people have real issues with math because of dyslexia, dyscalculia, or genuine issues with working memory. We can and do help these students, but the overwhelming majority of people don't. Instead, it's simply popular in our culture to think math is really difficult--especially (let's just say it) for girls. I don't know if there's a low population of particularly adept math teachers or if curricula have just become absolutely crazy, but I often find we need to invest a great deal of time with fundamentals, even with the most advanced students. As someone who believed in high school that I was bad at math myself, I'm empathetic to the frustrated and confused student--and have grown particularly skilled at opening up for them the fun that is mathematics. ~Elizabeth

Do you guarantee results?

Unfortunately we can't guarantee results any more than we can go in and take the test for you, which we do not do because we have integrity.

There are so many variables we can't control:

• test center conditions (crying students, lack of AC or heat, snoring, ill-prepared proctors, etc.)

• a student's ultimate anxiety level and attitude on test day

• any given day’s test content

• how much a student studies and genuinely retains during preparation

• how many hours a student can invest in preparation

That being said, the overwhelming majority of the time our students excel and if the score doesn’t improve we’re able to identify why.

If we weren’t successful, we wouldn’t still be doing this twenty years later.

What technology do you use? Is it expensive?

We use technology that's free to our students and offers real-time simultaneous editing and note-taking capabilities. Each year the technology gets cheaper and lately it's been less than $100 for students to be equipped to participate in one-on-one online tutoring. All you need is a computer with sound, an internet connection, and an inexpensive pen tablet, which not all students require depending on the topic of study.

If you have an iPad with a stylus, we welcome that, too.

We do not use Zoom because Zoom feels like school. Standardized tests are miserable enough as it is. We’ll FaceTime you.

Are you sure online tutoring is effective? Wouldn't this be better in person?

As members of Gen X, we too remember the analog world and we were also initially a little iffy about the efficacy of working online entirely. As it turned out, we were the ones who were touch and go about it, and our students, who have grown up completely connected, were perfectly comfortable.

We'll get coffee with you if you’re touring colleges in the area, but we still think everyone actually loves working online more, even if we’re next-door neighbors: everyone is dressed comfortably and casually, sessions begin and end punctually, there's more time for studying and review without shuttling back and forth to a tutoring center, and we have all the materials we need immediately at our fingertips.

How long does it take to get to my goal?

We do not subscribe to formulas or a one-size-fits-all program. We've seen scores increase after four hours; we've seen students chip away with 40 hours or more. Everyone is different. Score gains our students need to earn vary. Our commitment is to communicate with students and their families so everyone knows how things are developing.

Can't I just use the free prep on the internet?

Sure! You could. But:

• You won't be held accountable.

• Most students skip over game-changing lessons because they think they're familiar with topics that are actually still unclear to them.

• Free content companies that have partnered with the test makers do not provide strategies for cracking the tests because that would be counterproductive to effective testing, so your ultimate score increase is unlikely to be as high as if you were working with people who aren't in cahoots with the test maker.

• Most of the free test prep features men making up word problems about trolls and princesses who need saving, which is particularly unappealing to female students.

How much does it cost to work with you?

Depending on who you work with, academic coaching starts at $125/hr. Test preparation starts at $175/hr and goes to $350/hr.

Our pricing is highly competitive and typically lower than comparable tutoring companies—those companies that consider themselves unparalleled in the industry, many of whom charge $750 and up per hour (yes, seriously). You could argue we aren't expensive enough; however, we're able to keep prices lower than those companies because we keep our overhead costs low and don’t spend money on ads, and we're pleased to pass those savings to our clients.

Why should I pay more when I can pay $85/hour at the local tutoring center?

If you're paying $50 to $80 hourly at a local tutoring center, even if you're paying a licensed teacher, which many large franchises boast, you're very likely working with a tutor who is only earning around $12 to $22/hour. If you want to know what tutors earn, check Craigslist job postings. Most tutors are bright people who use tutoring as a transition to a different career and they lack the years and years of experience it takes to teach effectively and with great nuance.

Anyone who is a long-term, invested expert in the field of SAT and ACT preparation doesn't want to work for the same amount of money they could earn doing entry-level admin work. Dollar for the dollar, the amount of insight, information, and coaching you receive in even a handful of hours with us far outweighs the value of a dozen hours with someone with limited experience.

We recently had a student say, “I have learned more in two hours with you than in a whole year with my tutor at [Extremely Expensive Tutoring Company You’re Likely Considering].”