Boosted Brains ACT Prep

"The ACT is more coachable than the SAT."

Parents hear this and sometimes think I'm saying the ACT is easier or requires less intelligence.

That completely misses the point.

Coachable doesn't mean easy. It means systematic improvement is possible through pattern recognition and deliberate practice.

Let me show you what this looks like.

At Boosted Brains, we identify your student's specific weaknesses. Then we build custom drills targeting those exact question types. Then we ingrain that practice until it becomes muscle memory.

This approach requires three conditions:

Consistent question types to identify. Predictable patterns to drill. Stable format for muscle memory to develop.

The ACT provides all three. Same question types test after test. Same patterns. Same structure.

The SAT doesn't. Practice materials don't match test day. Adaptive format is unpredictable. Question difficulty varies wildly.

You can't systematically improve on an inconsistent test. Even with expert guidance and hard work, improvements become unpredictable.

This isn't about which test has harder questions. It's about which test responds to coaching.

The hardest test isn't the one with difficult questions. It's the one you can't prepare for consistently.

That's the post-2024 SAT problem.

Your student is willing to work hard. They deserve a test where that hard work produces reliable results.

The ACT is coachable. The SAT is not.

Comment "PROGRAM" below and I'll send you details about how our coaching approach builds systematic improvement on the ACT.

My 36 ACT score got me a six-figure job in investment banking.

I quit to help your student get the same score.

People thought I was crazy.

"You went to University of Chicago to become a test prep tutor?"

But here's what they didn't understand.

I'd seen my sister Ellis go from 27 to 33 in six weeks after expensive prep classes failed her for months.

I'd seen her friends get similar results using the same system.

I'd experienced my own transformation from 31 to 36.

The results were too consistent to ignore. And the ACT prep industry was too broken to leave unchanged.

I'd been working in investment banking—a prestigious, high-paying career that my 36 ACT had helped me land. Interviewers had literally said "University of Chicago and a 36 ACT? You should be interviewing us."

Now I was walking away from it.

To work with high school students.

For a while as a tutor, it was great. Then I realized the tutoring model itself was broken—incentives completely misaligned.

So I made another decision that seemed crazy: quit tutoring and rebuild the business as a coaching model with aligned incentives.

Now, years later, the decision has proven right.

Over 1,000 students have improved by an average of 5+ points. Families have unlocked hundreds of thousands in scholarship money. Students are attending schools that would have rejected them before.

The investment banking salary is gone.

But the impact is immeasurable.

I left significant money on the table because I believed the system could transform student outcomes. That's not something corporate ACT companies can claim.

Their executives optimize for shareholder value. I optimized for impact—even when it cost me financially.

That's the difference between working with someone who left a prestigious career to do this work versus working with a company that views your student as a line item in a quarterly report.

Comment "GUIDE" and I'll send you the Parent's Guide to ACT Planning—the roadmap I wish I'd had when I was wasting 100 hours on ineffective prep, now available because I made the choice to focus on impact over income.

I wasted over 100 hours on ACT prep.

And I'm the guy who takes weird routes on Waze to save two minutes in traffic.

I meal prep in bulk. I plan errands in a spreadsheet. Everything in my life is about efficiency.

So when I look back at those 100 wasted hours, I still get annoyed.

Here's what happened:

I scored a 31 on my first ACT. Respectable, but not enough for Ivy League schools or maximum scholarships.

So I did what everyone told me to do. Bought the standard ACT prep booklet and got to work.

Take a practice test. Review the solutions for questions I missed. Take another practice test. Review solutions again.

Rinse and repeat.

I kept at it. Praying that when I graded the next test, my score would magically go up.

It didn't.

After over 100 hours of this, my score was still a 31.

I felt frustrated. I felt dumb. I felt self-doubt creeping in like maybe I just wasn't good enough.

And here's what makes it worse.

I see hardworking students making this exact mistake right now. Sometimes I wish they were LESS hardworking. At least they wouldn't waste their time and money on prep methods that don't work.

Your straight-A student isn't lazy. The system they're using is broken.

Hard work without the right system doesn't just fail to move the needle—it actively wastes the most valuable resource you have and creates self-doubt that makes your student question their intelligence.

Every wasted hour deepens that doubt.

If your student has been studying for months with zero score improvement, it's not them. It's the method.

Comment "SYSTEM" below and I'll send you the breakdown of our three-step system that took me from 31 to 36 and has helped over 1,000 students add an average of 5+ points to their scores.

Understanding isn't the same as doing.

This is why tutoring fails.

You can't learn to ride a bike by watching someone else ride.

You can't learn piano by watching someone else play.

Yet somehow we accept the idea that students can learn the ACT by watching tutors solve problems.

The tutoring industry has convinced parents that "expert explanation" equals learning.

But it doesn't.

When I was reviewing solutions in my prep booklet, they made sense. I understood why the right answer was right.

But my score stayed at 31 because I never practiced the skill itself.

I was consuming explanations, not building muscle memory.

It's like watching a piano player and thinking "I get it, I know what they're doing" versus actually sitting at the piano and forcing your fingers to find the right keys over and over until they move automatically.

Students watch tutors solve problems during sessions and think they've learned. They understand the logic. The explanation made sense. They could follow along.

But when they sit down alone with a practice test, they can't execute.

Parents are confused: "But they understood it during the session! The tutor explained it perfectly!"

Here's what they're missing:

Understanding is passive consumption. You watch and nod.

Doing is active practice. You struggle, fail, adjust, repeat until automatic.

Tutoring sessions optimize for the former—makes everyone feel good, justifies the hourly rate.

Real learning requires the latter—uncomfortable struggle, solo practice, repeated failures until breakthrough.

Most families never realize this until they've wasted months in tutoring sessions that produced understanding but no results.

After Coach Frank's baseball camp lesson, I stopped spoon-feeding myself solutions. I started drilling specific question types without looking at answers.

I struggled. Made mistakes. Eventually discovered strategies.

Drilled them repeatedly until automatic.

That's when my score jumped from 31 to 34 on math. Not from understanding more explanations. From actually DOING the skill until it became second nature.

Comment "SYSTEM" and I'll send you the breakdown of the three-step approach that focuses on building skills through practice, not just understanding through explanation.