What is your service area?
Our Skype, eProf and iChat tutoring and consulting clients live all over the world. Prospect Prep offers private one-on-one in-home tutoring services in New York City and the Southern Berkshires. Massachusetts communities served include Great Barrington, Sheffield, Stockbridge and Lenox. Connecticut communities served include Norfolk, Winsted, Canton, Simsbury, Avon, and West Hartford.
How much tutoring do we need?
It depends on your goals – there is a direct correlation between the number of tutoring sessions and the improvements our students achieve. Some students will see a 300-point score increase on their SATs after 8-10 sessions with our tutors; others will take longer to accomplish such gains. We constantly monitor our students’ progress through homework assignments and mock exams, and are in frequent communication with parents. We never lock our clients into a set number of sessions, and so you are able to adjust your tutoring program at any time.
When should we start tutoring for SAT or ACT?
The answer to this question is different for every family. Some prefer to get started with a few sessions the summer before Junior year, so as to avoid too much of a crunch during the busy academic calendar; some are able to achieve their desired score increases after just a few sessions a couple of months before the exam. Many factors come into play in making this decision, including the student’s academic workload, amount of additional extra-curricular commitments, and current scores on practice exams, not to mention the student’s disposition and level of self-motivation. Please give us a call for a free consultation!
How much do you charge?
We charge a fixed rate per 90-minute one-on-one tutoring session. Online essay support and Skype sessions are billed by the hour at a lower rate. Please call to discuss how we might tailor a teaching package to meet both your needs and your budget.
Should I take the SAT or the ACT?
The SAT and the ACT claim to assess the same thing – readiness for college-level academic work – but they are different in significant ways. Among them:
- SAT has more of a vocabulary component
- ACT has a science section
- SAT penalizes students for incorrect answers; ACT does not
- ACT has more of a focus on punctuation
- ACT Math includes slightly more advanced topics than SAT, but they are approached in a more direct way
- ACT and SAT Essay sections are different
The best way to resolve this question is to take a full-length timed mock exam in each exam before you start any tutoring. Then, in one session, we can review both sets of results and make an informed recommendation. Here is a link to a concordance table that compares ACT and SAT scores. Give us a call and we can get you pointed in the right direction!
Do you have a cancellation policy?
Yes. Like most other independent tutors – and every major agency – we do what we can to avoid losing income by means of a 24-hour cancellation policy. It is usually impossible to schedule a new student into an open slot at the last minute, so we charge families $150 for sessions cancelled – or re-scheduled to another day – less than 24 hours in advance.
Most agencies charge the full amount of the missed session, which can be a bitter pill to swallow – we hope that our policy is a little less burdensome to the parents whose children we teach.
Can you provide references?
Of course! We would we happy to provide you with contact information of satisfied customers who have agreed to provide us with references.
What materials do you use?
We have developed our own worksheet packets over the years, almost exclusively from hard-to-find published test materials. Our expert tutors also create materials on the fly, by creating diagrams and illustrating concepts, and by having students take notes in their Test Prep Notebooks. With our help, students also create their own math and vocabulary flashcards. We have found that active note-taking promotes more engagement with the concepts and retention of the key techniques and strategies than printed manuals and handouts do.
Throughout the course of the prep program, we will sometimes ask families to purchase a number of specific published materials for additional problem sets and practice tests (eg: The Official SAT Study Guide, Real ACT’s, etc).
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