Executive Summary:

Tim was a bright Mcdonogh student with a high starting score — 1420 walking in the door. His parents had signed him up to take a prep class with another local company. After months of tutoring with them, his score had managed to go down. Streamline turned things around.

Challenges:

In a large traditional classroom setting, teachers are obliged to “teach to the middle.” A test prep classroom faces the same constraints. Tim’s weaknesses weren’t the same as his peers: he needed the next level of instruction. In the meantime, his parents had lost their faith in the test prep process. “My kid is smart — he doesn’t need this much help.”

Situation:

What accounted for Tim’s drop in score? Streamline was able to answer this. There is a great variety of concepts that can appear on the SAT. In addition, each concept can be tested in different ways — some easy, some hard, and some in between. In short, every test is different. In order to consistently earn a high score, you need not only to know every concept, but be prepared for the most difficult ways it may be tested. Easy gains can be made by ensuring the student is baseline acquainted with all the concepts — but Tim was already there. He had everything the classroom could offer. What he needed was a tutor.

Streamline’s Intervention:

Streamline created for Tim a rigorous three month prep regime, truncated to fit the time remaining before test day. He had a demanding workload outside of sessions, but we needed that much legwork in order to identify his areas of real weakness. In order for us to be absolutely certain we were going to make a difference, we couldn’t leave anything up to chance. The tailored environment of one-on-one tutoring allowed us to deliver the content Tim really needed to maximize his score.

Results:

Tim’s final score was a 1560! He walked out of the room with confidence that he had given it his all.