SAT Prep courses Offered to Students

Everyone knows that one’s SAT scores are an important part of one’s college application; and that one need to improve it as much as one can to get into one’s colleges of choice. One way to improve one’s score is through SAT prep courses, but which course should one chose?
There is a wide range of these courses offered. Some examples include those run by large businesses such as Kaplan or Revolution Prep, and a course offered here at Granite Bay High School by Scott Becker and David Tastor.
Courses ran by companies offer similar activities as each other, such as multiple proctored tests, classroom teaching sessions, extra practice tests and online instruction. These courses clearly focus on exposure to the test and its questions.
GBHS senior Stacy Wong, took an SAT prep course with her college counselor as a sophomore. The course included many different activities. “We did sample problems, we had homework…we did a practice test at the end and we did a lot of practice essays,” Wong said. Wong went on to take a lot of practice tests and studied more on her own in the months leading up to the test, and saw a 300 point increase in her score.
The proctors of these courses often claim that their course will raise your SAT scores quickly, but Tastor, a GBHS teacher, has a different opinion. “The practice that the student puts in is what will ultimately raise their score,” Tastor said.
Tastor said his position as the teacher of a course “is to offer the students an opportunity to see the questions in a different light… how the SAT is framing the questions,” Tastor said, and to “show the type of content that may or may not get taught in the ordinary classroom.”
Examples of such content include subject-verb agreement and usage mechanics.
Strategies “to approach a 25 minute essay…vocabulary in context, and then how to break down the passages” are included in their prep course as well Tastor said.
“(Scott) Becker and I are content area teachers” with years of experience, Tastor said, which means they are capable of explaining difficult questions to their students.
Senior Alison Hamby was one student who took an SAT prep course with Tastor and Becker. According to Hamby, Tastor and Becker’s course mainly focused on creating the tools needed to solve SAT level problems.
“(It was) not so much ‘here-is-how-you-solve-the-problem,’ more like the logic behind it,” Hamby said.
Hamby took the SAT for the second time after working with Tastor and Becker, and improved by 200 points.
In both the English portion and Math portion of the prep course, Tastor and Becker showed what specifically to look for in SAT type problems to help students figure out the answer, and would then assigned problems so the students had a chance to practice these new skills.
“(If) I hadn’t taken the course, I wouldn’t have known that” it was mostly about analytical thinking, Hamby said, they helped me “see that (the solution) should be simple.”
In the end, one way to decide who to take a course with has become apparent. If it is exposure to the type of problems on the SAT one is looking for, companies’ courses are the way to go. However, if one is looking to work on the tools to figure out these questions, a course with Becker and Tastor would be more favorable, as long as one is will to put in practice and get exposure on their own.