How Hard Is The SAT For The Unprepared?
Can you think of the last time someone you know showed up to take a road test without any previous time behind the wheel? Have you ever heard of a coach who liked to enter the season without any team practice just to get a baseline for performance? Would you pay for–or even attend–a concert of musicians trying brand new instruments? We generally recognize that important tasks, events, and challenges in life both demand and deserve preparation. Commitment, effort, and an enduring respect for the power of incremental improvement underscores the approach every scholar, athlete, and artist brings to their respective crafts. Somehow, though, despite the notorious influence entrance exams like the SAT and ACT play in college admissions, many students still take the tests cold. Teens who consistently study for every minor test in school somehow forget to study for one major one, while athletes who devote 20+ hours…
Why Holiday Tutoring Makes So Much Sense
The impending holidays often fill adults with that peculiar sense of dread that creeps up when days of celebration require weeks of preparation. But even post-Santa teenagers tend to view the span from before Christmas to after New Year’s Day with unfettered glee. This general merriment is inspired not just by holiday festivities but also by an extended break in studies, which every student surely deserves every now and then. So why do I recommend that high schoolers take advantage of the holiday break to catch up on tutoring and test prep? Surely, only a Scrooge would prescribe boring academic work during the holidays, right? Maybe not, if our concern is for student well-being over the entire span of the school year instead of just the final fortnight of December. With that perspective, three strong reasons emerge to support the idea that most high schoolers can benefit from a bit…
Chariot Learning Expanding to Syracuse
Truly effective test prep depends primarily on two things: a superior plan and superior practice. For nearly a decade now, Chariot Learning has been helping students in the greater Rochester bring those two factors together to earn remarkable scores and score increases. Over that time, we’ve also worked live online with students from coast to coast and even overseas. Our geographic range, however, has basically been limited to the Finger Lakes region. But not any more… Chariot Learning is now delivering our inimitable brand of expert, individualized SAT & ACT prep in-home to students in the greater Syracuse area. In fact, we’ve already started. We fully intend to bring our popular prep classes and proctored practice tests to Syracuse as well, but our debut in the ‘Cuse will be much like our start in the ROC: one-to-one, elbow-to-elbow, unified instruction to help each individual student earn his or her best…
Mental Models for the SAT and ACT
Education, or at least learning, must be more than the memorization of facts and routines. Learning is a process of developing ways of looking at the world, frameworks of reasoning, representation, and calculation that we can apply to different situations. Basically, learning is about developing mental models. A mental model describes a way to think about something. As a result, we should never try to apply a single model to every situation. Why do we need more than one? The investor Charlie Munger, who has mastered many complex systems to massive profit in his day, has said much about mental models: “… the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. “You’ve got to have models in…
Testing IS Learning
Believe it or not, tests aren’t just things you study for: taking tests can be a form of studying all its own. Henry L. Roediger III and Jeffrey D. Karpicke reviewed a century of research for their 2006 article, The Power of Testing Memory: Basic Research and Implications for Educational Practice. They found that frequent testing facilitates retention and recall more than passive studying techniques: “Taking a test on material can have a greater positive effect on future retention of that material than spending an equivalent amount of time restudying the material, even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information. This phenomenon of improved performance from taking a test is known as the testing effect.” Often, students just study passively by just rereading and rewriting notes. Testing, on the other hand, requires active recall of targeted information. This, the very…