Preparing for the SAT test can be a challenging experience. TutaPoint's experienced SAT instructors have helped thousands of students prepare for the exam. At TutaPoint we provide students with a comprehensive one-day preparation system that includes: 4 hour, interactive class, diagnostic report, 2 hours of private SAT tutoring and all of the books and materials.
Here is a review and recommendation from a parent of a student that recently took TutaPoint's online one-day SAT Prep Course:
Dear TutaPoint SAT Prep:
My son has maintained a 3.5 GPA through high school, however he has always struggles with tests. The SAT was really intimidating to him, so having only one more shot at it on the May 5th test I looked high and low for some sort of tutoring for him. Your crash course was above and beyond anything else offered, I only wish I would have found it earlier on his other attempts. We are looking forward to a better scoring on this test and it was largely due to your course and the follow up two extra hours one on one. Good luck securing future customers and try to ramp up the search engine optimization so it is easier to find you.
Sincerely,
Adrienne
You're a savvy educator with an entrepreneurial itch. You've got an idea for an online high school, but you are just not sure where to start. Here are five things you must know if you want to start an online high school:
1. Not all states require private schools to be licensed
It's true. Only some states require private schools to be licensed. If your online school is based in Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania or Wyoming you must be licensed. Otherwise there is no requirement that your school be licensed.
2. You do not need to write your own curriculum
Developing a comprehensive high school curriculum for your new online school can be daunting. And, as it turns out, is completely unnecessary. There are plenty of resources to purchase or leverage approved high school curriculum. By tailoring existing curriculum to meet your school's needs you will take advantage of some best practices and save a bunch of time. For a list of curriculum providers, download our free guide.
3. Accreditation is optional
Your online high school does not need to be accredited. While there are many advantages to becoming an accredited high school, your new school won't likely qualify until you are up and running. Advantages to becoming accredited include ability to apply for grants and funding, marketing designation and ability for your high school students to transfer credits to another school. Learn more about becoming accredited by reading our free guide to starting an online high school.
4. A niche will help your school stand out
One advantage that a new online high school has is its ability to provide a unique experience for students. Whether your school offers a specialty curriculum, unique faculty or has an exclusive partnership, you can use it to help your school stand out. Decide what your school will be known for, and plan your curriculum, staffing and marketing around it.
5. Your staff might be your secret sauce
No matter how unique your niche, advanced your technology or well-constructed your curriculum, at the end of the day it all comes down to your faculty. Finding and developing a teaching staff that will carry out your vision is essential to the success of your online high school. Learn more about attracting, hiring and empowering your staff in our guide.
Since its implementation ten years ago, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has led to hundreds of peer-reviewed research studies. Much of this research, conducted by school districts across the country, has been to measure the results of student achievement when classroom learning is paired with out-of-school tutoring. The vast majority of these research studies have shown that tutoring programs of all types measurably increase student achievement levels. Many new studies also look at how software-assisted tutoring online and off can improve student test scores. Let’s look at a few examples:
The Implementation and Effectiveness of Supplemental Education Services, a study by Carolyn J. Heinrich and Patricia Burch, analyzed the Chicago Public School District and found that in from 2003 to 2008 there was a drastic improvement in reading as well as math scores for students receiving at least 30 hours of tutoring during the school year. Many inner-city Chicago schools are Title I schools under NCLB, meaning that they receive federal funding to provide equal opportunity to all students, which covers part or all of the tutoring costs for low-income learners.
The Learn, Earn, and Achieve pilot program from Learning Makes a Difference Foundation found that a pilot program in Atlanta schools rewarding students with attendance payments for four hours a week of tutoring that included software-based learning resulted in children participating in the program outperformed a comparison group in science and math. This study was funded by grants and the donations of supporters.
Reading Rescue in Inner City Schools, a study by Patricia Muller and Randy Davies, assessed the effect of reading intervention through tutoring programs in six Title I inner-city schools in New York and found participating students scored nearly ten points higher than a peer comparison group on the final assessment test in the study.
Improving the Literacy of Young Urban Learners, a study conducted by Agnes Cave and Frank R. Yekovich, analyzed tutoring programs in language arts in inner-city school districts in the Mid-Atlantic, and found that using “authentic, problem-based learning activities” that included the use of technology resulted in tenfold gains in vocabulary and language expression and threefold gains in reading comprehension in the first year of the program, with gains continuing throughout the program.
Whether tutoring programs are funded through federal Title I funds, the school district, or privately, these programs significantly improve students’ test scores and learning progress in school districts where they are implemented.
Looking for college scholarships, but don't qualify for financial aid? Start thinking merit - attaining scholarships based on academic and SAT scores might be easier than you expect - but you need to know where to look and you should start planning now.
Published tuition rates at public and private colleges across the United States strike fear the prospect of paying for college seems daunting. To reduce costs, most families are aware of financial aid, but less is known about merit awards, also known as academic scholarships or merit scholarships. Colleges give out this money--approximately $11 billion in the United States each year--regardless of a family's financial status.
Typically awarded upon acceptance to a school, merit scholarships range from $1,000 to more than $250,000. A few cover the “full ride,” including everything from tuition to room and board. All are given in hopes that the student will choose their college over another.
Download the complete report for free.
Don't qualify for college financial aid? Grade Point Average (GPA) not steller?
You still can qualify for some of the billions of dollars public and private colleges and universities grant incoming students each year. One way to attain a merit scholarship is by scoring above average on your SAT or ACT exam.
“It takes 12 years to create a good grade point average. It can take about three months to insist that I have the best standardized test score possible--kind of a stark contrast,” noted Al Hoffman, director of the College Funding Service Center, LLC, in New London, Connecticut. “The addition of a good set of standardized test scores can make a huge difference in how much assistance you get.”
A student doesn't need to have spectacular scores--just scores that are above the average for that particular school. Students who take advantage of extra help and review for the SAT increase the likelihood of a college offering them money. And since so many students review for the test, those who don't are placed at a disadvantage.
Learn more by downloading the complete, free 2012 Merit Money Report.
Looking for Algebra Help? The internet offers a robust . By providing videos, worksheets and practice study guides, these sites are very useful aids to the students. The sites below range from sites like the Khan Academy where a student could learn algebra purely online, to sources that reinforce school learned concepts, to a site that provides games to see that math is fun!
Try These Algebra Resources:
1. Khan Academy
http://www.khanacademy.org/about
“The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” The Khan Academy is a website that brings Algebra to the computer screen. It is an interactive program that has an abundance of videos for the various concepts of Algebra, as well as practice exercises and assessments. The program allows for students to set their own pace to learning and have real time measurements of their learning.
Online algebra tutors on TutaPoint offer refer students to Khan Academy videos to reinforce skills learned during a live online math tutoring session.
2. Regents Algebra Prep - Oswego City School District
http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/math/ALGEBRA/math-ALGEBRA.htm
This is a website of a school district in New York. It has an abundance of mini lessons and practice exercises. You'll get immediate feedback on your Algebra progress. The website’s goal is to assist students with the Regents Exam that New York students must take. The Prep Center also includes interactive Algebra games, study tips, and practice tests for students. It is a great resource for students looking for extra review and practice in specific sections of Algebra.
3. Kuta Software
http://www.kutasoftware.com/free.html
Although Kutasoftware.com is geared towards teachers, it can also be a very helpful resource for students. This website has copious amounts of free worksheets for extra practice in Algebra. Kuta software is a great resource for students who may be preparing for a test and need extra practice problems.
4. Math.com - Algebra Resources
http://math.com/homeworkhelp/Algebra.html
Another helpful resource that students could use is math.com. Like many of the other Algebra resources, this website provides students with interactive lessons that review specific concepts in Algebra. These lessons include practice problems and allow students to check their answers after they have completed the problem. This website also includes brain training games, worksheets and study tips for math students.
5. Online Algebra Tutoring - TutaPoint.com
We would be crazy if we didn't mention the power of live, one-on-one instruction for Algebra. TutaPoint offers live online algebra tutoring at affordable prices. Students choose their tutor based on tutor bios and photos. All of TutaPoint's tutors are vetted to ensure they are experienced. Additionally, all TutaPoint online tutors are based the U.S. and pass a criminal background check.
As students prepare to take the SAT exam they search for secrets to beating the SAT. Some students will take SAT Prep Classes, and others will take our SAT Online Crash Course. According to the SAT Experts, Here are the Top 4 Things a Students Should do to Improve Their SAT Scores:
1. Look at your PSATs and identify topics and skill sets that need more attention and focus primarily on those areas.
Identify the areas that you had a hard time with and need more practice on before you take the real SAT test. Preparation is a key element for success on this test.
2. Purchase the Official SAT Study Guide issued by College Board.
This Offical SAT Study Guide is published by the makers of the SAT and it contains 10 different practice SAT tests. After examining what areas that you struggled with on the PSATs, practice those areas on the tests that are provided. By purchasing this book, students can prepare for the test on their own and learn more about the various sections and the reoccurring types of questions that are present on the SAT. There are many helpful strategies and study skills provided.
3. Focus on the different skills for each section of the test.
Critical Reading on the SAT
Knowing the meaning of words and the various vocabulary on the test is imperative. Sam Rosensohn, the founder and owner of College Planning Prep, says, “I knew students wouldn’t like hearing this, but critical reading is not going away. Students should look up every word in the critical reading section that they don’t know. Knowing 15 words is the difference between a 1650 and an 1800.” Identifying the words you don’t know is crucial to a student’s success on the SAT. Rosensohn said the three words that have recently been appearing the most on the SAT and will continue to appear are, “Ambivalent (meaning: conflicting feelings), ephemeral (meaning: fleeting), and pragmatic (meaning: practical).”
Math on the SAT
The most important thing to remember when taking the math section is to SLOW DOWN! “Students should remember its just as much a math exam as a reading exam. This is going to sound counterintuitive to students; but slow down when reading questions. This sounds counterintuitive because most students rip through questions to get to the work, but it is critical to slow down and carefully read through each question and unravel the opaque question,” says Rosensohn. Another helpful hint to remember is unlike in school, the SAT test provides you with the answers. When a students gets to a tricky question and they are not sure where or how to start, Sam Rosensohn encourages students to work backwards and plug in the different answers you are provided with in order to determine which is the correct one. According to Rosensohn, “This test is measuring aptitiude as well as math content, so the questions are tricked up and slippery.” Make sure to slow down and concentrate on each of the questions.
Writing / Grammar on the SAT
Since the grammar section is very repetitive and involves only a small amount of grammar topics, students should not stress too much about this portion. “If everything there was to know about grammar weighed 100 pounds, the grammar on the SAT test would weigh less than a pound,” according to Rosensohn. Students should focus on the grammar concepts that are found in the SAT Official Study Guide tests and familiarize themselves with the types of grammar concepts and questions that are repeatedly being asked. Rosensohn said, “The most common grammar found on the test are questions that deal with misplaced modifiers, ambiguous pronouns, faulty comparisons, subject-verb disagreement, and adjectives that should be adverbs.” Reviewing these concepts that repetitively appear on the test is important for students to do before taking the grammar portion of the SAT.
4. The SAT is a Beatable Exam!
This fourth step for improving your test scores is by far the most important step. Learning the skills of how to take the test and understanding the scoring are crucial. The best advice Sam Rosensohn can give to students is, “DO NOT take the test cold.” Students should have enough practice under their belts so that when they do take the test, they are prepared and ready. Rosensohn pointed out that it is essential for students to know how many questions they need to answer in order to get the score that they want. Knowing the amount you can leave blank on the test is an important strategy that every student should learn before the test.
For example:
If a student wants a 500 on the critical reading section, which would be equivalent of a 45 out of 100, they need to answer a little more than half of the test. For a 600, which is a 69 out of 100, the student should answer most of the test, leaving about 15 percent of it blank.
By understanding how the scoring works and knowing how many questions need to be answered, the students have more time for the questions they choose to work on. Rosensohn explained that preparation and knowing you can beat the test are two of the most important things for each student to focus on. “I have tutored thousands of students and when I am done tutoring a student, they are no smarter than when they started, but their scores always end up higher. This tells us that the more a student knows about the test, the more likely they will score higher.”
The March SAT test will be administered across the country on March 10, 2012. While the SAT might be just around the corner, it is not too late to begin preparing.
TutaPoint provides an SAT Prep Crash Course for the SAT Test. The course provides students with a 4 hour SAT Prep Class as well as 2 additional hours of private SAT Tutoring. This is the perfect SAT course for students that have not yet prepared for the SAT Test.
- 4 Hour Professional SAT Prep Course
- 2 Hours of Private SAT Tutoring
- Custom Results Diagnostic Report
- The Official SAT Study Guide, 2nd edition
- Crash Course Manual
You Wouldn’t Take Your Driver’s Test Cold,
So Don’t Take the SAT Test Without Prep
SAT Test: Saturday, March 10, 2012
SAT Prep Crash Course: Saturday, March 3 Sign Up Here
To take the SAT test without studying for the exam is a little bit like taking your driver’s test without taking Driver’s Ed. There’s no doubt that you know how to drive and there’s no doubt that a good Driver’s Ed program will show you just how to ace the exam – the same holds true for our SAT Crash Course for the March SAT Exam.
Our four-hour SAT crash course will show you just what you are going to be asked and then how to do it. We’ll teach you the mechanics so that when you come to a specific task – whether it’s a complex math question or an opaque critical reading question – you’ll know just how to respond and arrive at the answer that the test wants.
Every week we receive phone calls from moms and dads who call to say that their son or daughter is an A student with C minus SAT scores. The reason for that is quite simple: the work students are asked to do on the test is very different from the work they’re asked to do in school.
To illustrate the point: In Language Arts class students are constantly encouraged to not just repeat what the author stated, but rather to dig beneath the surface to find fresh perspective. While that’s a superior exercise, it’s the kiss of death on the SAT.
Rule Number One for Critical Reading: It’s not what you think the text is saying; it’s what the text said. Once students learn that the correct answers on critical reading mirror what was stated in the text, the test becomes eminently manageable.
The critical reading portion of the exam, the hardest part of the exam, is an open book test. All of the answers are in the text, and you can always put your finger on the right answer.
Students who take our crash course will learn our 3-2 Method for critical reading and why certain answer choices cannot be correct.
Students will discover that the math portion of the exam is as much a reading exam as it is a math exam. The SAT measures aptitude as well as content. When it comes to the math, aptitude is measured by convoluted, brain-exhausting word questions that are designed to confound. If these compact questions are not read carefully and then taken apart piece by piece, a student is likely to go down the wrong road. We’ll show you how to unpack and translate the trickiest math questions into easy-to-take steps.
Students will learn that to succeed on the SAT they cannot do math as they do math in math class – there’s just not enough time. Besides, there’s no reason to since the exam is multiple choice (unlike math in school) and gives you the right answers. We teach you to use the answers that are given and to work your way back.
Between you and I – ooops, I mean me. The grammar portion of the exam also becomes a lot easier if someone shows you what to look for and how to identify the errors. So, it’s always between you and me; it’s not between you and I. We’ll show you 20 similar mistakes that appear on the SAT. Here are a few: The construction “not only” always takes “but also” and requires parallel construction. Whenever you see the words more, greater or differed in a sentence look for faulty comparison – a period in history is compared to a historian or a painter to a painting.
None of the material on the test is too complicated; it’s much like the driver’s test. And it gets a whole lot clearer once we point out what you’ll be tested on and then how to practice on your own right up to test day.
By Ryan Duques, TutaPoint.com, co-founder
I am in love with the entrepreneurial world I live in. TutaPoint.com, the online tutoring company that I co-founded in 2007, is operating in middle of a disrupting industry: education. Disruption, which displaces old ways of doing things with new methods using technology, creates opportunities and typically reduces costs and increases output.
Disruption changed how we take photographs. Put the mainframe computer industry out of business as personal computers came into favor. Changed the music industry, leaving music stores in the dust as MP3 players came into favor. And now, disruption comes to education.
Apple, Inc. recently announced its new education initiative, disrupting the textbook industry as it rolls out its iBook Authoring tool. The new textbooks offered for iPad are interactive, more dynamic and less expensive. Disruption.
Recently I have had the opportunity to represent TutaPoint.com at several Startup events, leaving me energized and excited about the disrupting changes coming soon to classrooms (and beyond) everywhere... Soon.
Startup Weekend NYC EDU
I was fortunate to attend and mentor this past weekend at Startup Weekend EDU, an off-shoot of the successful Startup Weekend events (startupweekend.org). This event put on display an amazing amount of enthusiasm and talent oriented around creating a product or service for the education industry: everything from "Netflix for Education" to virtual penpal services to out-of-the-box classroom designs. All of the concepts are developed over the 54 hour weekend and then presented to a panel of judges.
"I was crossing my fingers for a good turnout. Which we were very fortunate to have. But I did not imagine the camaraderie and enthusiasm among everyone who participated. Not just among the participants who were willing to work tirelessly over the weekend on an education business idea; but among the mentors, judges, volunteers and our hosts at The Mandell School, as well," said Sharon LeDay of College Board who co-organizer the weekend.
Thirteen teams presented their education concepts to judges: Chaula Gupta (Teach for America), Heather Thompson Rivera (Google), Charlie O'Donnell (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures), Sachin Jade, Klifer Capital, Miranda Stamps (Schoolnet / Pearson) and Harold Levy (Palm Ventures).
The winners: Classroom Blueprint. A great concept, lead by Teach for America colleagues, that allows first time teachers the ability to search and select classroom set-ups from experienced teachers, who display their classrooms. The group quoted a statistic that there were 260,000+ photos on Flickr alone of teachers sharing their classroom set-up. That sounds like proof of concept!
Startup America's First Anniversary at the New York Stock Exchange
Last week Michael Callaghan, co-founder of TutaPoint.com and I represented the company at celebration of the first anniversary for the Startup America Partnership by ringing the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Along with seven other Startup America member firms, we were treated to breakfast in the NYSE Boardroom, where we each pitched our business's to Scott Case (Priceline.com co-founder and Startup America CEO), Steve Case (AOL founder and Startup America Chairman) and several NYSE executives. The event brought together startup firms, each striving to create useful new products and services and create jobs for our economy.
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TutaPoint.com is proud to be a startup company that is disrupting education. We are committed to providing excellent online tutoring, providing jobs and for helping our students achieve excellence. Companies like TutaPoint.com will change how students learn by making learning more effective, efficient and student-centric.