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
Listen Up for Better Scores
Drum roll please! PrepMe PSAT and SAT students will now be able to listen to their course while they work through it! We are always looking to make our courses more effective, and our user research showed us that narration not only increases student engagement, but it also helps many students retain more knowledge. The newly narrated content has been received overwhelmingly by the students with whom we tested this feature, and we're excited to now release it to all of our students.
When we first started this project, we obtained proposals from numerous firms but one narrator stood out: Johnny Heller. Johnny is an Audie Award winning narrator with over 300 audio book titles to his credit, was named one of the Top Voices of the 20th Century, is a 2008 winner of Publisher's Weekly Listen Up Award, and a part time stand up comedian. With a resume like that, it is easy to see why we picked Johnny to narrate our courses!
We are currently working with Johnny to create narration for our ACT courses and will be working towards even better and richer media integration for all of our new programs (shhh, we cannot tell you what that entails yet). You will see us enhance all of our courses with more media and give our students more ways to learn using high-quality curricular materials personalized to meet each individual's needs.
Thank you to Johnny and Spencer (editor and technician) for helping us launch PSAT and SAT course narration! We're thrilled about this launch and excited for the many additional upgrades we have coming in the next few months.
If you are already a PrepMe student, you can check out the new lessons by logging in at www.prepme.com/classroom.
Best,
Karan Goel
CEO and Co-Founder
Drum Roll Please… The PrepMe Precocious Program
I am proud to announce that we have officially launched our new Precocious Program. For the first time ever, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders will be able to prepare for the SAT with a program designed just for them. The college admissions process is more competitive than it has ever been and it is going to get more competitive each year. The Precocious Program presents a vehicle for students to start their preparation early and reduce their stress.
We have received some great coverage on the launch of the program. The Financial Times featured our program yesterday with a feature story (pg. 9 in print).
I want to thank all of the parents and students, tutors, and the rest of the PrepMe team who helped us develop this program. We will continue to listen to our students and their parents as this program evolves. We are here to help you rock the SAT!
Best,
Karan
PrepMe CEO