Great minds think alike: shopping cart and burger menu design
Our engineering team went out to lunch at a burger place we all love: The Counter. Why do we love it? Because it's personalized.
As we sat down to order, one of our engineers noticed how similar The Counter's system for placing an order and PrepMe's new shopping cart are. Try out our new course enrollment process and judge for yourself.
Fewer than 40% of U.S. Students are Proficient in Mathematics
Another day, another set of articles (CNN: Report card shows U.S. students need to improve math skills; WSJ: U.S. Math Scores Hit a Wall) about how our students are failing and falling behind their classmates around the world.
We can publish study after study with the same conclusion, and politicians can point fingers at each other all they want, but in the meantime our students will continue to suffer. Our children may not vote or pay taxes, but they are our future and we must invest in them. As trite as that sounds, we as a nation need to care - and do - more about education.
We have already proven that, in many situations, online learning is better than classroom learning. Let's use online learning to help more students in a hybrid environment that combines the benefits of both kinds of learning.
Those of us who are online educators must become even more vocal advocates for improving student outcomes. We must also remind others that this is not an "us vs. them" contest; this is about helping our students. Let's remember why we decided to pursue careers in education in the first place - to help students learn.
Best,
Karan Goel
CEO & Co-Founder
Last-minute PSAT Tips From PrepMe
You've studied. You've practiced. You've worked hard. Now it's time to show the PSAT who's boss. But don't let up now. A few small things just before the test can make a world of difference. Presenting PrepMe's last-minute tips for acing the PSAT!
1. Get a good night's sleep and eat a proper breakfast.
First, the basics. Sleep 8 - 10 hours the night before your test and make sure to eat a real breakfast the morning of the test. The best breakfast is one with a variety of foods that have carbohydrates, protein, and fat.
2. Be prepared.
Assemble all of your materials for the next day and have them ready to go right by your door or in your backpack. You'll need your picture ID, sharpened pencils, eraser, calculator, extra batteries, test registration form, and driving directions. It's a good idea to pack some healthy snacks for extra energy, as well.
3. Read and write something before you leave home the morning of the test.
This one can make a huge difference in the first hour of the test. Read a newspaper article, a short magazine article, or a blog entry and write a paragraph summarizing what you've learned. This will ensure your brain is warmed up and functioning well before you take the test. You don't want the PSAT to be the first thing you read or write that morning!
4. Keep your momentum.
Try to keep a good pace to avoid running out of time on the final questions. Remember, each question has the same value. If a certain question holds you up, it's better to leave it for later than to get bogged down in one tough question. As a rule of thumb, try to get through the first 10 questions in each section within the first 7 minutes.
5. The PrepMe Slogan: Prepare. Relax. Ace.
You've already prepared with the best. Now relax a little: make sure to watch some TV, read a book, or talk to your friends online. Do something that relaxes you. Then walk into that test and demolish it. The PSAT will be over sooner than you realize; stay calm and focused and you'll ace the test!
Now you're officially ready. Make us proud! Call us at 1-877-PREPME-4 or email your PrepMe tutor and let us know how you did and how we can help you with your upcoming SAT.
P.S. If you still need a little more practice, take a free practice test, play our vocabulary building game, or download our free calculator tools which are permitted on the PSAT!
New Shopping Cart Experience
We've just launched a brand new shopping cart experience for our users. This is a big launch because it synthesizes much of what we've learned over the last year from our users, including how they think about PrepMe's products and services, and how difficult it can be to understand how different features fit into a PrepMe subscription.
To this end, we've simplified how someone can enroll with PrepMe with the following and many more improvements
- Modularity - We clearly call out the features of our subscription and what the costs are for each feature you can add-on
- Contextual Help - We've made it much simpler to know what information we need from you at any time with big green arrows that point out what information you need to enter
- Multipay - We now let you pay in multiple payments rather than paying up front, all at once. We know the economy is tough and we want to help families attain their educational goals.
We're constantly iterating on all parts of our site and product that require significant user interaction. If you have suggestions or feedback, please let us know: support@prepme.com. Check out our new shopping cart and enroll in an SAT, ACT, or PSAT course today!
Search Engine Ranking Script
Like many companies PrepMe tries to keep its eye on how we rank on search engines for various phrases. I tried to find a simple script to help us gather this data quickly and easily, but unfortunately there wasn't much out there (that didn't cost an arm and a leg).
I threw together this command line php script and class to do just that and it's free to download. It will spit out the rank for each of your keywords on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Modify checkRank.php with the keywords you care about and your website's URL and then run the script. We're releasing this under the open source GPL 2.0 license so do with it as you see fit!
NACAC 2009 Review: The Great, The Good, and The Ugly
The PrepMe team had a terrific time at NACAC in Baltimore. Here's a quick summary of last week (in reverse order, we like to end with positives!):
The Ugly
- The "Joe Wilson Moment" on my panel where a lady yelled out "but they don't educate everyone" in response to me reminding the panel that the U.S. K-12 education system lags many other developed nations significantly. Really? For the record, the U.S. is ranked 18th out of 36 in the OECD's analysis of education in the developed world. We most certainly aren't educating everyone.
- The test prep companies that get lost in the minutiae. Good test preparation is about educating, not about tricks. Please stop wasting students' and parents' time and money on things that have a minimal, if any, impact on their scores.
The Good
- Crab chips are quite tasty! Thank you to our Twitter friends for your recommendations!
- Conference turnout was strong despite the challenging economy and impact on school budgets. While attendance was down from Seattle 2008, we had many more conversations than we did last year. Thank you to the organizers.
The Great
- The panel on "SAT Test Prep - Sharing What Works". It was terrific to hear form 3 guidance counselors from very different schools (rural - public, urban - public, suburban - parochial) talk about their experiences and how they've effectively integrated test prep into the school day to help their students succeed. The key takeaways were that successful test prep needs to be (a) integrated into the school day, (b) focus on curriculum so that it integrates with school and can rely on teachers for support, and (c) be personalized so students get the help they need.
- The number of people who came to speak to us after the panel who agreed completely that curriculum-based test preparation is the only way to go. Tricks just don't cut it.
- Meeting many of our competitors including some who are absolutely wonderful people and sincerely dedicated to helping students succeed. Thank you for stopping by our booth!
- The friends we made in our industry and the partnerships we'll be starting over the next few months to help bring high-quality, personalized online ACT and SAT prep to thousands more students across the country.
- All the guidance counselors who came armed with terrific questions about how our curriculum is designed, how our reporting engines work, and how our tutors are compensated. Your students are fortunate to have you as their counselor.
Thank you Baltimore for a wonderful time, wonderful food, and mostly wonderful weather! We'll see everyone at NACAC 2010 in St. Louis!
We Heard You Loud and Clear: Personalized ACT and SAT Prep for Better Results (PrepMe @ NACAC 2009)
NACAC LAST YEAR
As we head to this year’s NACAC Conference in Baltimore, we find ourselves in a place where ACT and SAT scores continue to decline in America and college continues to become more expensive despite the recession we’re in. Schools have faced budget cuts and families are in a tighter economic situation than ever before but we all want students to succeed.
At last year’s NACAC Conference in Seattle, we listened to numerous counselors talk about what students needed to succeed in the college admissions process. We spoke with counselors about the tools they used to help students improve their ACT and SAT scores and found that most counselors were quite dissatisfied with their current options. (We also ate a lot of great salmon and we’ve been told to try crab chips in Baltimore this year!)
More specifically, here’s what we heard:
Classroom Course
- The classes are not targeted
- Students become disengaged quickly because the classes aren’t relevant to their needs
- Students are extremely busy and have a hard time fitting classes into their schedule (and therefore also miss classes frequently)
- The quality of instruction is often low and teachers from some companies sometimes don’t even show up
- The classes almost always focus on tricks and students don’t learn much
Many Online Programs
- There is little-to-no personalization
- The pedagogy is weak
- The curriculum is just text on a screen and is not engaging
- The courses crash very often and frustrate students
- There is no one-on-one support
What we heard even more often was “we have no evidence that any of these work.”
OUR WORK IN THE LAST YEAR
We heard you. Your students are unique in their own way. They learn differently. They need help in different areas. They need something that works on their schedule. They need a tutor who they can connect with. Most importantly, your students need something that works.
We spent the last year working very hard at improving our personalized online ACT and SAT courses, and have added significant interactivity along with dozens of additional lessons and hundreds of additional practice questions. Our goal has always been to allow for greater insight into student achievement while giving students more opportunities and resources to master the various skills they need. Our standards-based approach allows us to deliver curricula that not only help students succeed on the ACT and the SAT, but in school as well. Just this past year, students using our ACT Gold Program in schools (this is our program that does not include a tutor) averaged a 3.2 point improvement on the ACT. You can hear one of the teachers involved with this program speak about PrepMe at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAhPEYslJJg
In addition, we’ve upgraded our personalization algorithms, iterated on our user experience based on user studies, and implemented an extremely powerful reporting platform to help schools analyze their students’ performance.
We have built our ACT and SAT course to offer true value to students, parents, counselors, and schools. Students love that it’s accessible 24/7, that it’s interactive, that it’s personalized, and that their tutors are paid based on how much their score goes up. Counselors and schools love PrepMe because it’s easy to administer, we offer teacher training and support, and we offer deep insight into a school or district’s performance across essential curricular areas.
NACAC THIS YEAR
We’ve been asked to speak alongside one of our partner schools – New Oxford High School in New Oxford, PA and you can find us at:
Date and time: Thursday, 9/24; 3:15 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Room Number: 309
Session Number: A100
Final Title: SAT Test Prep – Sharing What Works
You can also find me alongside the PrepMe team at Booth 416 in the exhibit hall! If you can’t catch us there, call us at 1-877-PREPME-4. We’re here 24 hours per day, 7 days a week to make sure your students succeed!
Best,
Karan Goel
CEO & Co-Founder
Earth Day Savings Extended!
We had an overwhelming response to our Earth Day promotion and have decided to extend the offer!
Call 1-877-PREPME-4 by April 30th and we'll give you a coupon code for 10% off any of our courses.
PrepMe’s new Classroom
Hey everyone,
I wanted to write a quick note and let you all know that PrepMe has released a brand-new version of our test preparation classroom. Our engineers have been working around the clock to get the new online classroom ready for our students, and we're happy to declare that their hard work has paid off!
In addition to all of our existing features, our new classroom comes with an updated user interface, an entirely new testing experience, and an enhanced reporting infrastructure so that our students can track their progress more closely than ever before. And for the techies out there, we've also launched a number of backend improvements to make the experience faster and far more scalable for our users, and will soon be launching a brand new version of our partner API.
So sign on and see what's new, and keep your eye out for a number of brand new features rolling out in the next few months!
PrepMe Celebrates Earth Day
Dear Friends,
April 22nd is the 39th celebration of Earth Day. It is an event that knows no national boundaries nor digital barriers. All efforts to preserve our planet, no matter how small, can make a difference. On Earth Day, April 22, 2009, we are asking students and parents to join us in picking the environmentally responsible test prep solution: PrepMe.
Using PrepMe's online test prep instead of commuting to classroom-based PSAT, SAT, or ACT classes reduces fuel consumption, decreases air pollution, reduces carbon dioxide emissions, and reduces our society's dependence on paper materials. These are just a few reasons why we believe PrepMe is the greener way to go.
PrepMe is offering services at 10% off our regular prices for one day only! You can take advantage of this promotion by enrolling at http://enroll.prepme.com or calling us at 1-877-PREPME-4. The 10% discount will be applied automatically when you enroll.
This promotion is good until 11:59PM Pacific Time, Tuesday, April 22nd. Please feel free to distribute this promotional offer to friends and family.
Sincerely,