Jared Nguyen - The SAT Tutor

Your teen just finished AP exams this week and the August SAT is right around the corner... Now what?

If they haven't started prepping, they need to start right now.

Do not be that family that takes a random two week break in between AP exams and the SAT because you "need a break".

Why? Because your teen is going to be extremely out of rhythm if they stop their studying momentum now. Let me put it this way: it takes way less energy to keep your car ignition running than it is to shut off the engine and then turn it on again.

And besides, you only have fourteen full 14 weeks until that August exam.

If you take two weeks off "recharging", you're all of a sudden at 12 weeks. Which would typically be fine, but most of you have summer plans coming up. You're going to Italy, your teen is doing a summer internship, travel ball, whatever. That's going to take another 1-4 weeks off of their entire prep... and now you're in trouble.

The best students actually started prepping two to three weeks ago. But you're not too late, as long as you follow these three steps.

Step 1) The Efficiency Index

This is where a lot of students get it wrong. They think they need to focus on everything because they don't know what their weaknesses are. They go front to back in a textbook or down the entire Khan Academy curriculum. It doesn't get them anywhere and they get bored because it doesn't pertain to what they actually need to do. It's not targeted to them.

Your teen needs a comprehensive diagnostic process so they can see exactly which of the 64 SAT concepts they actually need the most help on. Not just what they're getting wrong, but why they're getting those things wrong.

There are only three reasons why your teen would ever get something wrong on the SAT.

1) They never learned it. Maybe they forgot it, or they just never understood it in the first place.

2) They know how to do it, but they don't know how to do it in 30 to 60 seconds, which is what the SAT requires on average per problem.

3) Fatigue. They don't have the stamina to make it through the entire test. They spent so much time on the beginning portion that by the time they got to the end, they were fried and making silly mistakes.

If your teen doesn't understand WHY they're making the mistakes, I don't care how many practice problems they do, they're never going to get to the root cause of their issues.

Let me give you an example to hammer this home.

Let's say your teen got something correct on the exam. You might not think they need to work on it because they got it right. But what if that problem took them five minutes to do? Even if they got it right, is that a strength? Probably not.

On the contrary, if they got the next three problems after that one incorrect, but they only had 10 seconds to do each one because they were rushing, does that mean those are necessarily a weakness? No. You have to do a little more digging than that.

It's not enough to say, “Hey, you got this wrong, do a million problems that look like that.” You have to figure out what that problem looks like in the context of the regular exam. That's what tells you what to actually target.

Step 2) The Pressure Protocol

So many students have no structure to their practice. They blindly do work just for the sake of doing work. 30 minutes here, an hour there, nothing the next week. There's no real consistency in their prep.

And even if they understood their weaknesses, that's not enough volume or repetition to really get anything done.

Once your teen understands which concepts they need to work on, they need to use real SAT problems that mimic the same types of problems they're missing right now, except these are TIMED and slightly HARDER than the real thing.

Yes, of course your teen needs to learn the concepts, the strategies, the techniques... But they need to apply those concepts in an environment that is slightly harder than the real thing so by the time they see the real thing, they're just like, “Okay, I've done this a million times. It feels like nothing to me.”

Most students do a bunch of practice problems that are way too easy. They think they're getting improving, but then they see the real pressure on the exam and go, “This is harder than anything I've ever done before.”

The perceived difficulty of the real thing has to be lower than what they're used to.

Step 3) Test Simulation

Students use practice exams that are way too easy in comparison to the real thing. They'll use Bluebook, they'll use Princeton Review, whatever. Those tests are sometimes 100 to 150 points too easy compared to the real SAT.

So they take the real thing, bomb it, and never want to study for it again.

Your teen needs to use tests that are slightly harder than the real thing. By the time your teen sees the real exam, it feels like clocking in and clocking out, like any other Saturday.

A lot of your teens are student athletes. A lot are musicians. A lot are theater kids.

If you're an athlete, how many times has your coach said, “You practice the way you play. You play the way you practice.”? Same thing in theater. How many dress rehearsals do they do before going in front of the real thing? Dozens.

It's the same exact thing for the SAT. This is not school where you can memorize a bunch of stuff, regurgitate it on a piece of paper, and all of a sudden get a 1500. That's not how it works, family. This is a strategic test.

Which brings me to the last piece. Your teen needs to be very, very consistent.

If your teen is doing those three steps but only running the Efficiency Index, the Pressure Protocol, and the Test Simulation once in a while, this is not going to work.

The best students, the ones I've seen get 1500s and close to 1600, do about 45 minutes to an hour of targeted prep every single day.

It's just like the weight room. If you work out once a week, you're not going to get any stronger or bigger. Same thing for SAT. Follow that process to a tee up until the August exam, and I guarantee you 12 to 15 weeks of sacrifice is more than enough for your teen to get the results they're looking for.

If all it took was 3 months of dedicated prep to get your teen the results they're looking for, is that not worth it?

I'll leave you at that. If you need help applying this to your teen's unique situation, send me an email or a DM. No obligations.

Until then, have a great rest of your day.

If your teen is taking the August SAT and they haven't started yet, start now.

I know what you're thinking: "Jared, but we have AP exams and finals! We don't have time!" Let me bluntly tell you something that you already probably know: it is much easier to get a 5 on the AP exam or an A on a final exam than it is to get a 1400-1500+ on the SAT... so if you haven't planned your prep now, your teen is going to be in trouble.

At the time of this recording, there are 15 weeks until the August exam. That sounds like a lot... but it isn't.

Here's how it actually plays out: Parents talk to me and say, "Jared, we want to start after AP exams." The problem is after AP exams, that's two weeks from now. You go from 15 weeks down to 13 weeks. Then it's, "You know what, we still have final exams coming up, I need to take another week off." Then summer hits, and all of sudden there's a two week vacation to Italy or a summer internship that is going to prevent you from studying.

Now all of a sudden, you went from 15 weeks to 10-11 weeks of prep.

That is teetering really close. The best window for prep is usually 12 to 14 weeks. You can get away with 10, but it's tight, and it depends on how strong your teen already is.

Do not make the excuse that AP exams and finals are coming up. It happens every single year. Parents and students fall into that trap, and by the time they actually start practicing for the SAT, it's already too late.

Here's the reality most families don't think through.

There is never going to be a good time to start SAT prep. There's always going to be another exam. Another internship. Another vacation. Something is always going to get in the way of your teen getting the score you're looking for.

It's especially serious if your teen is a junior. If August is going to be their first attempt at the SAT, that is one of the last realistic chances to get this right before early decision deadlines for Top 50 schools. And if you think your teen is busy now, wait until they get to first semester of senior year!

You might be asking, well Jared, what if we just take the September exam after August? Once August scores come back, that's only two weeks until the September exam. You're not going to make any real movement in that time frame. So either August is your last attempt, or you take August knowing that no matter what, you have to keep studying through September with no breaks.

Now how do we fit SAT into everything all at once?

If your teen is trying to balance AP exams, final exams, and SAT prep, and that's the reason you haven't started yet, hear me out.

You would rather be in rhythm practicing for the SAT going into finals/AP exams than not.

Let's say you completely scrape SAT off the table and all your teen does is focus on AP exams and finals. By the time they're done, they're at 0% intensity for SAT prep. Now they have to go from 0%, crank it to 100%, and stay there until August. That's brutal.

If they start now instead, they don't need to go 100% right away. They go from 0% to maybe 20%, just enough to stay warm and keep SAT in the back of their mind. While they're studying for APs and finals, they get to about 50% intensity. Then once APs and finals are done, they go from 50 to 100 and it doesn't feel so jarring.

Here's what we've learned: You don't get fatigued when you're in rhythm. You get fatigued when you stop completely and then try to go from zero to 100. That's when your body and your mind go into shock.

I would rather your teen be in rhythm the entire time. Spend a little extra time on SAT prep now so that by the time finals are done, they're not completely out of it mentally.

If you want help applying this to your teen's situation, send me an email or a DM. No obligations.

Jared

Parents, I've met with over 250 families this year for SAT prep. Every single one of them had some version of the same three problems.

Here they are, and exactly how to fix them.

Problem 1: They have no idea where to start.

A lot of the parents I work with are immigrants, or their teen is the first one in the family going to college in America. They had no idea how the US system worked for test prep or college admissions. And their teens had no idea where to start for SAT prep either.

So what do they do? They rely on Khan Academy, Bluebook, a test prep book, or some generic platform with a tutor. They go cover to cover if they're using a textbook or they go through the ENTIRE Khan Academy program... and they get nowhere.

Why? Because those materials are created for EVERYBODY. And a curriculum made for everyone is a curriculum made for no one. It has nothing to do with your specific kid.

I could have two students both scoring 1100 and those two could have completely different weaknesses. It would not make sense to throw them into the same generic plan.

If you don't know what your teen's weaknesses are, if you don't know how to diagnose the problem, it's going to be really difficult for your teen to attack anything.

What your teen needs is a comprehensive diagnostic exam to see exactly which of the 64 SAT concepts they actually need the most help on. Not just what they're getting wrong, but why they're getting it wrong.

Is it a timing issue? Is it a concept issue? Or are they just so fried from the earlier portion of the exam that by the time they got to the end, they were fried mentally?

If you don't know exactly why your teen is making the mistakes, I don't care how much brute force practice they do. They're never going to get to the underlying issue.

It's like trying to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but you don't even know where the rainbow starts.

Problem 2: Parents have no idea how to structure their teen's prep.

Knowing the weaknesses is one thing. Practicing them in a way that actually moves the score, in a way that fits into your teen's schedule, is another thing entirely.

Most of the students I meet are athletes, musicians, theater kids, doing extracurriculars, internships, whatever. The SAT gets pushed to the back burner because the test is two, three, maybe four months away. They don't feel like working on it yet.

So they wait until the last minute. A month before. And by then, there isn't enough time.

A realistic runway is 10 to 12 weeks, sometimes more if your teen is particularly weak.

But even the students who make the time don't know how to actually practice. They focus on what they got wrong, not why.

Here's the move most parents miss:

What you got wrong is not always a weakness. Getting something right doesn't always mean it's a strength.

If your teen got a question correct but spent five minutes on it, that's not a strength... On the contrary, if they got the next question wrong because they burned so much time on the previous one and only had 10 seconds left, that may not 100% be a weaknesses.

Which one should they work on? The problem that took them five minutes.

..But most students aren't even aware of that.

And then there's the materials problem. Khan Academy, the College Board question bank, the Bluebook exams. These are nowhere close to as difficult as the real exam. Students think they're practicing properly, their practice scores are going up, but then they take the real thing and it's so much harder than what they're used to.

Prep should be harder than the real test. If the hardest test your teen ever takes is the real SAT, their prep wasn't hard enough.

Problem 3: Their teen is scared of the exam.

A lot of students and parents think this test is going to change the rest of their lives... this is some what true. It does affect the scholarships your teen can get and it does affect the colleges they can go to.

So there's an emotional blocker. Either they don't want to try because they're scared of failing, or they're so anxious throughout the entire process that they never demonstrate what they're actually capable of.

The only way to treat this anxiety is continuous exposure, consistency with the exam.

For my students, that means homework every single day and a full practice exam every single week. That's not for show. That's not doing it for the sake of doing it. They have to be used to seeing the material so that by the time they see it on the real thing, they're not scared.

We fear what we do not understand. We fear what we are not prepared for. That's the only reason your teen is ever scared of the SAT.

Those are the top three problems I see in every family.

If you guys need help applying these to your teen's unique situation, send me an email or a DM. No obligations.

Jared Nguyen, Geometry Gurus SAT

Parents of athletes, your teen is going to bomb the SAT if you keep treating it like a school test.

Here's what I see constantly.

3.9 GPA. Honors classes. Captain of the team. Sits down for a practice SAT and scores 1180.

And the whole family panics.

Here's the truth. School is much easier than the SAT. Being naturally smart is enough to get an A in AP Chem. It is not enough to get a 1450.

But here's the part that should flip a switch for you.

The SAT mentality is the same mentality your teen already uses in their sport.

Why does your teen go to practice five days a week? Why do they lift in the offseason? Why do they watch film?

Because talent gets you to the starting line. Preparation wins the race.

No athlete shows up to a championship without practicing. That's insane.

So why do these same athletes think they can show up to the SAT cold?

The SAT is a championship game. It rewards reps. It rewards consistency. It rewards students who simulate the conditions a hundred times before test day.

Your teen already knows how to do this. They do it every day in their sport.

They just have to apply the same mentality to a different arena.

Parents, this is exactly how one of my students, Rena, increased her SAT score from a 1200 to a 1350 in less than 10 weeks.

A little bit more about her... She is based out of Florida and she needed at least a 1330 to qualify for the Bright Futures scholarship.

She was just like your teen and most of the teens I work with right now. Honestly, it kind of feels like I'm always making the same type of email/post because all these students share the same problems.

She was doing Khan Academy, she was doing YouTube, she had a private tutor, and she was bouncing around from program to program…but nothing was really working for her. Whether it was self-paced or with a person, she was stuck at that 1200 no matter how much she tried. She was there for around six or seven months before she really saw any real score improvements.

She came to me and said, "Jared, I'm still so stuck. I don't know exactly what I need to study."

She just didn't have a road map in front of her. She was originally from South Africa, so they didn't teach it the way America teaches it. She was just like, "I don't know where to start." There are so many concepts tested on the SAT, and even that is different from school.

So what we did with her are the same three steps I'm going to show you right now.

Step One. The Efficiency Index.

Remember, she was telling me, "Hey Jared, I don't know where to start. I don't know what I don't know."

So what we had to do was a comprehensive diagnostic to see exactly which of the 64 SAT concepts she actually needed the most help on. Not just what she was getting wrong, but why she was getting it wrong.

Because the reality is this. There are only three reasons why you would ever get something wrong on the exam.

Number one, you just don't know it. You never learned it or maybe you forgot it. With her, that was a lot.

Number two, she actually knew how to do it, but she didn't know how to do it in 30 seconds. So she was running out of time.

Number three, fatigue. She spent so much time on the beginning portion of the exam that by the time she got to the end, she was completely fried. She was making silly mistakes even when she knew how to do the problem without that timer on it.

Anybody can be like, "Okay Rena, you got this problem wrong. Do 10,000 problems that look like that." That's not really diagnosing, family. There are so many different reasons as to why you get something wrong. If you just blindly do the things you got wrong, you might be doing things you don't even need to work on.
Let me give you an example to drive this home.

Let's say you got a problem wrong at the end of the module, but the only reason you got it wrong is because you spent FIVE minutes on a problem earlier that you ended up getting correct. So yeah, you got it wrong, but it's because you only had 10 seconds to do it. You were rushing. Even if you know how to do that problem, you just didn't have enough time.

Would it make sense to work on that problem over and over again? No. Because you actually already understand how to do it.

What really was the issue was that problem you got correct that took you five minutes. A lot of students look at the stuff they got right and say, "I don't need to work on that." That's an illusion. If you spent five minutes on a problem, you better work on it, because that's affecting your ability to do the problems at the end.

Step Two. The Pressure Protocol.

This is why step one is so important. If you don't do step one properly, you're just going to blow your entire prep out of the water working on the wrong things.
Once we understood exactly which concepts she needed help on, we gave her real SAT problems that mimicked the same types of problems she was missing, except we made sure everything was timed and slightly harder than the real SAT.
Yes, you need to understand the concepts. Yes, you need to understand the strategy and techniques…

But she needed to be able to do those problems in a test-like environment that was slightly harder than the real thing. So by the time she saw the real thing, she was just like, "Okay, done this a million times." It felt like nothing to her because during prep she was always pushing past her comfort zone.

A lot of students practice on their own and spend a lot of hours, but it's too easy for them or not enough difficulty to get them to the next level. It's like if you went to the weight room and never put extra weight on the bar. You use the same weight forever. You're never going to get bigger. You're never going to get stronger.

It was not a consistency issue with her. It was not an effort issue. She just didn't know what she needed to work on, and she didn't know how to properly structure her practice in a way that would actually improve her score. Which is why step two is so important.

Step Three. Test Simulation.

Once we did step one and step two, we needed to work with tests slightly harder than the real SAT.

She was using the Blue Book exams and before she took her real test, she was scoring 1350-1400 on those.... But she never scored that on the real thing (1200).
That's because those Blue Book exams, and every other exam most traditional test prep places use, are way too easy in comparison to the real thing.

How many times do you do dress rehearsal before you put on a play? A million times. You have to do it as if the audience is there. If you don't, by the time you see it, you're going to be very nervous.

Now, the most important part: it's not enough to just do step one, step two, and step three one time.

The good thing with Rena was that she did it every single week. She never missed a week.

If you take a look at her chart, you can see exactly why she got the results she got. She went to every single class we had. She went to every single office hour. She went to every one-on-one with intent. She was also consistently doing 200 to 250 problems every single week and never missed a diagnostic exam.

Students who are that consistent, students who are that present with their work, very rarely do badly on the exam. It's only the students who are half foot in, half foot out with the process who get subpar results.

That's Rena's story. She's currently still working with us and wants to break past that 1400 barrier. I'm very confident she can do it now. Her super score is 1370, so we can definitely get her past 1400.

If you guys need help applying this to your teen's unique situation, go ahead and send me an email or a DM. I'd be more than happy to help you guys out.
Until then, have a great rest of your day.