By choosing to enroll your child in an SAT course, you already giving them a significant advantage as the importance of ‘test prep’ is growing every year and will not stop any time soon. The SAT is an integral part of the US University admissions process and the rise of countless amounts of SAT prep materials, books and courses speaks to this as more and more students are turning to outside help to get a leg up on the competition. Thus the importance of picking the right SAT prep program for your child is crucial in giving them a further edge in raising their score. Having gone through the process myself, I have learned that not all SAT prep courses are created equal and choosing the right one will go a long way in helping your child achieve the highest possible score they can on test day. While the amount of courses out there can be overwhelming, asking the right questions about each one will help you quickly narrow the field down and find the best one for you child:
 

1. Are the instructors qualified and properly trained to teach the material?

Many programs advertise the high SAT scores of their instructors and the names of the top-flight universities they attended and while on paper this seems ideal, it’s almost never the case. What you should look for in choosing a program is as much their experience with the SAT itself as their knowledge of the curriculum and strategies they are teaching. Your child will be much better off learning sure-fire strategies from a qualified instructor with sufficient experience than from a former 2400 scorer that has never learned or used the strategies himself.
 

2. Are students learning widely applicable strategies to ‘beat’ the SAT?

I have many friends and classmates that attended SAT programs throughout Vancouver that only made them monotonously do drill after drill and memorize endless lists of vocabulary words. This is in fact a popular strategy among many test prep companies but one that will never help a student score as high as they could on the SAT. Being taught from a well-developed curriculum is of much more benefit to students and in my course, I was taught many tricks and strategies for each section on the SAT that prepared me to face all sorts of questions on the SAT. After all was said and done, these were much more helpful than mere repetition of SAT questions with no proper guidance or instruction and led to me scoring a much higher score than I would ever have through slogging blindly through drill set after drill set.
 

3. Are students applying their lessons to actual SAT material with the help of the instructor?

While there is merit in working through many SAT questions, it is only advantageous if students use the strategies they learned as they do it. In the SAT course I took, the instructor worked through sections of official SAT practice tests with us, teaching us how to apply the strategies to each question and exposing us to the wide variety of question types. This was much more beneficial than unguided rote memorization and practice which does not prepare students to deal with unfamiliar questions that might appear on the SAT, while strategies will.
 

4. Does the program administer full-length practice tests under simulated SAT conditions?

At the end of the day, after students have learned strategies to tackle each section, practice is the main key to SAT success. The course I attended administered four full-length practice tests that mirrored the SAT environment and if it wasn’t for these, I would never have been able to perform to the best of my ability on the SAT. These tests helped prepare me for the mentally taxing conditions of the 4-hour SAT marathon and taught me how to keep myself focused and sharp for such a long period of time.