The College Wizard

Brandon, you may be surprised to learn two things. First, I congratulate you and I am thrilled that you achieved 2110 on your SAT and 33 on your ACT. I am happy when a student achieves significantly higher SAT and ACT scores with or without my help.

Second, I have to consider you one of my success stories. When you began working with me in October 2014, your initial SAT score was only 1620. You completed the first four lessons with me, during which time I taught you all the strategies needed to achieve a perfect SAT and ACT score. You seem to credit me with your initial jump to 1830 (210) points but not your eventual score of 2110. Evidently you still remember my writing strategy: Choose the shortest answer as long as it does not contain one of nine grammatical errors. I suppose we simply differ on the characterization of my strategies. While I consider my techniques powerful because they all fit on a single page (which is why I am able to teach them all in the first four lessons), ridiculously simple, easy to remember and yet 100% effective, you call them “gimmicky and cheesy”.

I will be the first to admit that enough self-practice in and of itself can produce almost any score desired. Unfortunately, self-practice without any outside guidance can require many more hours to achieve success than practice following guidelines that an expert has spent years developing and refining. Since most of my students are somewhat overburdened with school work and extracurricular activities, they would prefer not having to “reinvent the wheel” if I can simply direct them to practice in the most efficient way possible.

Assuming that you achieved your final 2110 SAT score relatively recently, it would mean you took 14 months to go from 1620 to 2110. I believe you might have achieved that score somewhat more quickly had you taken advantage of ongoing lessons with me. It would have given me a chance to teach you that a phrase like “much more better” which you used in your review is grammatically incorrect.

To clarify your claim that I taught you “not to guess and skip questions you do not know”, it is true I have advised students preparing for the old SAT to avoid guessing. The reason for this strategy is that the old SAT incorporates a guessing penalty for each wrong answer. And while probability theory might suggest that guessing is a good idea, my own years of analysis demonstrated that because the SAT creates wrong answers to be more attractive than correct ones, students will choose the wrong answer – even in a 50/50 situation – over 90% of the time. But since the new SAT no longer has a guessing penalty, this issue is no longer relevant.

I checked back on our chat logs relative to the “constant disconnecting” you refer to. First, while I do see a handful of starts and stops in our Skype sessions, I don’t know that I would call them “constant”. Second, while I do have the highest commercially available internet speed in my office, the overall quality of a Skype call can be diminished by slower internet speed on the other end.

I try to use any feedback I receive to improve the quality of my service. I know that your parents did not take advantage of my initial Skype lesson, which would have been an opportunity for you to get an idea of the kind of strategies I teach (and therefore whether or not you felt they were “cheesy”) as well as the quality of Skype calls we could have given your home’s internet speed. As a result of your feedback, I plan to be even more adamant about having new clients take advantage of my free Skype lesson prior to signing up to work with me.

I wish you all the best as you await your college acceptances.