AT/ATW Info Booklet

AT/ATW Info Booklet

Our approach to learning is • Long-term : Cognition involves phases of comprehension, application, and repetition that take time, both during and between teaching sessions. The benefits of such productive work, of course, become long-term as well. • Rigorous : Advantage Testing students work hard. We teach the efficiencies of skill, knowledge, and sound reasoning rather than short cuts or tricks. Assignments, memorization, drills, and practice tests are crucial components of our programs. • Comprehensive : For more than thirty years, we have continually refined and expanded our teaching materials and approaches. Our curricula and instruction reflect a depth and breadth born of experience and thorough analysis. • Practical : We design and implement concrete strategies with specific steps toward attainable goals. Practice itself is the backbone of our structured test preparation. • Creative : Tutors adapt their distinctive styles of teaching to each individual student, while the student in turn is encouraged to contribute to the process. Our tutors must be… • …able to motivate students of whatever background or ability to achieve their highest possible scores. • …experienced, dedicated teachers who have received uniformly outstanding reviews from their students inside and outside our program. • …energetic, informal, and approachable so as to be able to establish productive relationships with our students. • …top performers required to score in the 99.5 th percentile on any standardized test they teach for us. • …students themselves of the continuously evolving science of standardized test construction. Sensitivity Advantage Testing has experience achieving outstanding results with students of every ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural background. Our instructors are responsive not only to their students’ individual learning styles and academic needs, but also to their personal stories, unique self- identifications, and individual perspectives.

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Reputation Advantage Testing is recognized as an industry leader among tutoring organizations and the nation’s foremost expert on standardized test consultation and preparation. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg “ Advantage Testing’s commitment to excellence and social responsibility truly represents the very best our great City has to offer…Advantage Testing has fostered intellectual

growth and academic success amongst the future business, artistic, and civic leaders who will shape our City and our world. ”

The New York Times “…perhaps the City’s premier tutoring service.”

The New Yorker “The Institute for Advanced Study of tutoring services.”

The Wall Street Journal Arun Alagappan, Advantage Testing’s President and Founder, profiled as “Donor of the Day” for “helping to find the next generation of leaders who will bring diversity, new ideas, compassion, and a different kind of leadership to institutions.” The London Evening Standard “A pioneer in instituting the scrupulous standards that have elevated tutoring to the respected profession it has become in New York City.” New York Magazine Arun Alagappan featured in cover story “The Influentials: The people whose ideas, power, and sheer will are changing New York.” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg “For a quarter-century, Advantage Testing has been an outstanding advocate for equal opportunity in education… The task of preparing every student for college and a career is not over yet. We are headed in the right direction, however, and thanks to the dedicated professionals and friends of Advantage Testing, we can look forward to more New Yorkers becoming life-long learners.”

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International classroom experience Advantage Testing has created uniquely effective group programs that draw upon our expertise in test preparation and academic content while providing focused, individualized educational experiences to students in a classroom environment. These numerous models of class instruction reflect our commitment to serving diverse communities throughout the nation and across the globe. École Jeannine Manuel For the last 15 years, Advantage Testing has conducted a highly successful test preparation program for students of the École Jeannine Manuel in Paris, the largest independent school in France. • For the past six years, EJM has been ranked the #1 school in France among French high schools (public and independent). It is the most prestigious and selective bilingual school in all of France. • Advantage Testing’s dedicated SAT/ACT preparation program has been integrated into the EJM general curriculum. Students who are interested in applying to US schools register for our SAT/ACT class as part of their assigned coursework. • EJM students have among the highest admission rates to top U.S. colleges and universities in all of France. • EJM’s Director Bernard Manuel, who served on the Board of Lycee Francais in New York City, personally approached Advantage Testing to develop a partnership of sustained excellence over many years. Abu Dhabi Summer Academy For nearly a decade, Advantage Testing has been the sole provider of college admissions test preparation to recipients of the Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed scholarship for Outstanding High School Students enrolled in the Abu Dhabi Summer Academy. • In addition to SAT and ACT tutoring, Advantage Testing offers Summer Academy students TOEFL iBT and IELTS tutoring. This partnership has achieved consistent and dramatic success in increasing the Summer Academy students’ test scores. • The previous Summer Academy cohorts with whom we have worked have improved their composite SAT or ACT test scores by 45 percentile points on average. • Given that approximately three million students take these tests annually, we can estimate that each Summer Academy class has effectively bolstered its average admissions credentials to surpass around 1.35 million test takers in the college application cycle. • Advantage Testing’s ongoing relationship with the Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed scholars has enabled us to develop, implement, and refine a program tailored to the specific needs of its Summer Academy students.

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Other classes • Advantage Testing instructors provide ACT, SAT, and SAT Subject Test instruction to LEDA students at Princeton University. • We have lead and continue to lead successful test preparation classes for groups such as Prep for Prep , the Bronx Preparatory Charter School , Harlem Village Academies , and Eleanor Roosevelt High School . • Advantage Testing instructors provide classroom LSAT instruction to students enrolled in TRIALS , a five-week residential scholarship program to prepare students of underrepresented backgrounds for admission to leading law schools. • We partnered with public service organization Lima Aspirations to support teachers from leading US universities with curricular instruction and materials to prepare 30 students of modest means from Lima, Peru to apply to American colleges. Locations Advantage Testing has multiple domestic locations and two international ones. The number of students and tutors, programs offered, and tutoring fees vary by location. • New York, NY • Boston, MA • Washington, D.C • Portland, OR • Westchester, NY • Los Angeles, CA • Philadelphia, PA • Seattle, WA • Long Island, NY • Silicon Valley, CA • Pittsburgh, PA • Minneapolis, MN • Houston, TX • Pasadena, CA • Princeton, NJ • Charlotte, NC • Austin, TX • Boca Raton, FL • Northern NJ • Raleigh-Durham, NC • Dallas, TX • Westport, CT • Denver, CO • New Orleans, LA • Chicago, IL • Las Vegas, NV • St. Louis, MO • Salt Lake City, UT International • London, UK • Paris, France

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SAT and ACT PROGRAMS Advantage Testing comprises a group of instructors who care deeply about education and who specialize in SAT and ACT test preparation. Our faculty consists primarily of high honors graduates of leading colleges and universities who hold graduate or professional degrees. In all our test preparation programs, tutors expose students to the core intellectual concepts they may encounter on the test. Together, tutor and student develop disciplined strategies for approaching each section. We emphasize learning the material thoroughly and thinking critically about every question. Weekly meetings, assignments, and practice tests help students develop a deeper knowledge of the critical topics and refine their problem-solving techniques.

Our systematic, educational approach to the SAT and ACT emphasizes critical reasoning, rules of grammar, writing structure, prose style, vocabulary building, and efficient methods for solving the math problems that recur on the quantitative sections of these tests. Our SAT Subject Test curricula are designed to equip students with a solid foundation in relevant subject matter that is both independent of and complementary to their progress in related academic coursework. We do not believe in the effectiveness of “tricks.” Of course, we teach the approaches and strategies relevant to each test—when and how to guess, what order to follow in working through the questions, when to look at the answer choices, and so forth—but our academic approach is consistently rigorous and educational.

The precise length of our programs varies widely depending upon such factors as: • the test being tutored • the student’s performance on the diagnostic test and practice tests, and in related academic pursuits • when the student begins preparation • the student’s goals • the number of meetings the student has with the tutor each week • the date the student plans to take the official test

Each tutoring program is designed to address the particular needs of the student. Our highest priority is to convey a systematic approach to learning that will help our students achieve their best possible score on test day and will continue to empower them throughout their academic and professional endeavors.

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Reading Our Reading materials emphasize both the vocabulary a student must develop to grasp college-level material and the ability to read, digest, and extract essential information from a given text. Instructors help students recognize recurrent question types and differentiate right from wrong answers. Our students become more attuned to the significance of word choice and more adept at discerning an author’s meaning—skills that are useful in any college career. Moreover, we have developed a comprehensive series of vocabulary lists representing the words most frequently tested in context on the Reading sections of the SAT and ACT. Mastering the nuances of such words helps students improve their assessment of vocabulary-driven reading comprehension questions on both tests. Math Instructors emphasize the facts, concepts, and principles underlying Math questions. Our Math materials identify the mathematical terms and the more than 100 recurring math question types in Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and miscellaneous topics that have appeared on the SAT and ACT. In addition to student exposure on practice tests, these terms and question types are exercised, with levels of difficulty commensurate to those on the official test, in our math worksheets, problem sets, and summary reviews. Writing/English The multiple-choice questions on the Writing & Language section of the SAT and the English section of the ACT test traditional grammatical and syntactical principles as well as idiomatic expression. Instructors train students to develop a critical eye for editing what they read and what they write. We teach the underlying concepts governing verb, pronoun, and noun agreement, verb tense, parallelism, proper syntax, logic and clarity of expression, etc. Students are often gratified to recognize that the skills that help them improve their accuracy on the writing sections of standardized tests will also help them identify and correct errors in their own writing—on test Essay sections, in the college application essays they write, and in their schoolwork and written assignments.

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Essay On the both the ACT and new SAT, the Essay is unscored and optional. However, many selective colleges expect students to fulfill the Essay assignment. The ACT essay prompt presents multiple viewpoints on a given topic, and the student is tasked with developing his or her own viewpoint, addressing points raised in those provided. The SAT, on the other hand, presents a published article or speech with a distinct point of view and asks the student to discuss how the writer makes his or her case. In essence, the ACT essay asks students to construct an argument, while the SAT asks students to analyze an argument. In preparing for either essay component, students practice and refine the process of evaluating a given topic or essay and assembling a coherent and persuasive response in a limited period. ACT Science Reasoning

The Science Reasoning portion of the ACT is the one section of this test that does not overlap with the SAT. However, the critical reasoning abilities that students refine while preparing for this section apply to other standardized tests and to a wide range of academic undertakings. Instructors emphasize the skills of interpreting, analyzing, and evaluating. The ACT Science Test typically includes charts, graphs, diagrams, and passages that represent >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43

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