About

Our ACT course and SAT program in Cincinnati are focused on getting students maximum results by first offering a diagnostic test to see where our students are at how quickly they are catching onto the steps that we teach.  After surmising the ability level and potential of our student in our first lesson, we make an individualized plan to help the student make the most of his time with us.  

The basis for our program begins with our stepwise system, in which we show our pupils how to gather the components of each problem, classify the types of questions, and know where and how to look for the answer.

When dealing with math, this means setting up the problem and mapping out where we are going. We signify where we are going to in the end, so the student knows where to stop. We also show students how to write out all of the known facts, the most basic details, so we have a schema to start with.  We then fill out those details and carefully put the pieces we need in the right place. This is done by using the strategies of the famous Gary Gruber, PhD, who himself has helped students increase their scores several hundred points on the SAT exam.

In the reading comprehension portions, we start with underlining all of our context ideas. This allows us to know what we are looking for when we go to the passage or when we are beginning with our choices. We then look at the right part of our passages, based on our classifications of those questions. Once we find the pieces we need in the passage, we then make our prediction,
writing out what we have found. This allows us to correlate that prediction with our choices.

Science, on the ACT test, calls for a similar system, where we start with underlining the essence of what we need to find from our questions. Then we classify into one of two types of questions, so we know where and how to find our answer, which may be in one of our passages, though most of the time is in one of our pictures, tables, or charts.  The equivalent of our underline step in reading or math is done for science as well. We fill out the charts, tables, and graphs as much as possible, completing any patterns, showing any relationships, and finishing any equations, so we can then make our prediction and match it with the correct choice.

English (called writing on the SAT right now) is more rule oriented. Though we sometimes need to underline what we need in our passages, most of the time we start with our verbs, which leads us to our subjects. We can then can check for conjunctions, which allows us to see if any relationship in the sentence is being changed.  This allows us to then classify to see what type of mistake is present in the sentence:  grammatical marks, modifiers, verbs, or parallelism.  While going into the subcategories of mistakes might seem a challenge, we use a college textbook that has helped many of our students to a perfect score on the English portions of the PSAT, SAT, and ACT. Our final check for our standard question is for accuracy and efficiency. Can we say our sentence more concisely without affecting the author's intended meaning? This is our objective as we head into our final steps. Our final consideration is the type of question, if it be reading-comprehension-oriented. We either treat the question as a main idea question or as inferential reasoning.

Finally, we have some questions that require us to work with vocabulary. We primarily use a context method to relate the word to other words around it. Then we use other related words in Englsih, Spanish, Latin, or French to help us understand what the biggest piece possible in the word might mean. We can then make a prediction before we correlate with our choices.

Test anxiety is obviously an important factor to consider for many students. We show students test anxiety techniques so we can treat the underlying causes of their stress and actually use that energy to help them focus better than they would normally be able to do on their test preparation.

Please give us a call if you have any questions about our private tutoring programs for the SAT and ACT in Cincinnati.