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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He think he should be able to do better at verbal, is 730 low score for him?[/quote]

It’s possible. The conventional wisdom is that the verbal section is harder to improve on with tutoring than math, because it’s hard to teach reading comprehension over a short period of time.  However — the SAT is set up differently than the ACT, but my kid (who took the ACT) was able to make a considerable improvement on the English (grammar) portion (he brought it up from a 30 to a 35). He already had a 36 on reading, and he can write well, but the format of the grammar questions tripped him up somehow the first time around.  He was being tutored to bring his math score up (which also worked), but I think they spent one session on grammar and it made a dramatic difference. He also spent part of one or two sessions with the tutor on Science, and brought his score up from a 33 to a 35.  I would look at the details of the questions he missed and see if they are the type that would lend themselves to some “tips and tricks” from a tutor (e.g., grammar vs. reading comprehension”). [/quote]

How many tutoring sessions your child had?  Can you also let us know who the tutor was?[/quote]

He was scheduled for 12 hours (ended up being 11 after a cancellation on our end) with the tutor, plus a few hours a week of practice tests. It was two one hour sessions twice a week, mostly over the summer. He did it with Arborbridge (via Zoom). I overheard a few sessions, and was very impressed with the professionalism of the tutor and the Admin I dealt with.

I’m not an expert, but after doing some research on this, it seems that tutoring can be really helpful if you have a kid that has scores that are unbalanced (high in one area and low in another), because the higher the score is, the harder it is to improve (the difference may be just a couple of questions). My kid needed to bring up his math score, so if you just had one area (e.g., grammar) that you need to focus on, you would probably be able to get by with just a few sessions or working with Khan Academy, if your kid is motivated. One thing that Arborbridge did that was helpful was have DC take a practice test before we signed up (which was free) and then analyze exactly what types of questions he missed. You could do that and see if your kid’s “misses” were in a specific area. If so, some concentrated study could probably improve his score. If they’re sort of spread randomly across the entire section, then it’s probably less likely.

TBH, my kid could have taken it more seriously than he did, but he raised his composite from a 31 to a 34 by working about 4 hours a week for six weeks, which seemed a good investment of time. My DC isn’t interested in Ivies, and a 34 is probably sufficient for the colleges he is applying to, so we didn’t even discuss taking the test again.

What I have learned is that you can absolutely “buy” several points on the ACT. There’s no way my kid would have done it on his own (and he’s got a 3.9 UW gpa with no oversight from me).

As for the pressure to have a high score, I do think the DC area is in sort of an “arms race.”  I have friends and family in another part of the country, and the kind of prep that kids do here, even the self-directed kind, is very rare. They *might* attend a weekend seminar. In an area with a lot of high-achieving kids, it’s harder to distinguish yourself, so it’s not surprising, but everyone just keeps pushing the bar up higher and higher. I honestly don’t know if ADs take that into account or not. Is a 34 from DC worth less than a 34 from a rural area? Do they assume that everyone from an affluent area of DC has been prepped within an inch of their life? Who knows? [/quote]

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