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Executive Summary
This case study tells the story of an 11th grade ACT student in a Northwestern suburb of Chicago - Naperville. By working with MyGuru for a total of 6 hours, focused on a few particular areas, she achieved a 3 point score increase. Of course, results are hard to predict, but focused help for 5-6 hours can result in significant bumps of 2-3 points on the ACT if a student is simply “stuck” in a given area.
Introduction: Why We Develop Case Studies
MyGuru students seek private tutoring for a variety of reasons.
Some are already scoring above the 90th percentile on a standardized test, but realize that getting into an Ivy League university or one of the top graduate, MBA, Law, or Medical schools is only getting more intense, and thus seek private tutoring to squeeze out a few extra points on the test. But, others are truly struggling, scoring well below average.
For some students, the key issues are knowledge-based –meaning the students don’t know certain facts or understand certain concepts that they need to master to perform better. But, in more cases than many people might realize, the issue is more emotional or psychological – the student just needs a private tutor to help them build confidence, relax, and perform.
The benefit of customized, private tutoring is that the particular situation, strengths, and weaknesses of the student can be understood and addressed by the tutor, thus improving performance. The purpose of MyGuru’s Case Studies is to illustrate how a particular student benefited from private tutoring. Of course, your or your child’s particular situation is unique – but if you can draw some comparisons and identify some similarities, you might be able to envision how private tutoring would benefit you.
Student Situation
Located in a northwestern suburb of Chicago, this female student had a very high GPA, but her ACT test scores were not correlating well to the grades the student was receiving in school in the difficult classes she was taking – she had previously taken the ACT and scored a 24. She had studied for the ACT previously, but had not really understood why she was missing the questions that she was missing. She was effectively “plowing” through practice problems without connecting the errors to things that she could do better the next time she saw similar problems. Furthermore, the student has a very busy schedule she needed to navigate in coordinating a private tutoring relationship.
The Tutor
The tutor we matched with this particular student holds a BA-History from Duke University, and scored in the 95th percentile on both the ACT and SAT. Having spent several years as an ACT/SAT tutor at the Huntington Learning Center and several more as a private tutor, he’d developed his own particular style of tutoring, in which he spends a lot of time upfront ensuring he understands the student’s ingoing strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and personality before designing a tutoring experience.
Tutoring Approach
Our tutor started by analyzing the student’s previous test scores, noting particular questions types within the Quantitative Reasoning and Reading Comprehension sections where she was answering questions incorrectly. Given that the student was taking the test again in about three weeks, four 1.5 hour long tutoring sessions were scheduled, for a total of 6 hours.
As mentioned earlier, this particular student had studied for the ACT previously, but had not really understood why she was missing certain questions. She had been quickly going through practice problems without connecting the errors to things that she could do better the next time she saw similar problems. We worked with her in a structured manner to show how she should be approaching the different sections, careful to spend only a certain amount of time on each section, in accordance with the six hours of tutoring that were planned. The tutor pointed out formulas and techniques that were “need to know” for different sections, and assigned practice problems after each session.
Results Achieved
With repeated feedback, this student made very quick progress. She was a very disciplined student and had a strong academic background to begin with, which helped tremendously. Ultimately, she was able to raise her ACT score from 24 to 27 after only 3 weeks of focused tutoring.
