If so, you are very well-informed Americans of the Colbert Nation. If not, listen up: Stephen Colbert speaks the truth because he has the facts. And Stephen’s Sound Advice is that you must ace the SAT’s or ACT’s if you want to get into your top-choice college and get a good job.

Luckily, although Stephen asserts that you must spend money to prep for the exam, PrepMe offers premium online test prep starting at $299. We also offer a 100% money-back guarantee: your scores will go up or your money back.

And, in tribute to the good people of Colbert Nation, we're offering a special 10% discount off of our courses. To take advantage of the offer, apply the code COLBERT during enrollment or mention "The Colbert Report" to your PrepMe Advisor (1-877-773-7634). Offer is valid through May 31, 2010.

Learn more about our course offerings by clicking here.

Oh, by the way, the 10% off applies to the 20-hour video tutoring package as well.

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

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!

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

We made the announcement today at Portland High School in Portland, Maine with Maine's Governor, John Baldacci, and Maine's Deputy Commissioner of Education, Angela Faherty. One of our advisors, Rick Bolton, spent much of Wednesday afternoon walking students through PrepMe's SAT program and helping them understand how our adaptive learning technology works. The students and the principal of the school all have had extremely positive things to say (hear what they have to say on a video from NBC News - Portland, ME) and we look forward to working with Maine's public schools to make test prep available for their students. There is also a Boston Globe story on our substantial donation.

We will keep you posted on all of the press and the success of these wonderful students.

We are thrilled about this opportunity and hope to announce many more equally exciting initiatives here in the coming months. A big thanks to our advisor Rick Bolton without whom none of this would be possible. Thanks Rick!

Best,
Karan

PrepMe CEO

Governor Baldacci, Karan Goel, and Principal Michael Johnson announce PrepMe's $13.5 million donation of free SAT prep over 3 years

I'm Eric Bjerstedt and I'm one of the senior tutors at PrepMe. I'm a third-year linguistics concentrator at the University of Chicago. I was diagnosed with ADD and Tourette Syndrome at the age of eight. Over time, I have learned to deal with these disabilities without medication and want to share my thoughts so that others may benefit as well.

I recently had an article published in ADDitude Magazine entitled "When ADD Meets the SAT" and over the course of the next few weeks, I will be sharing my tips. Here is the first one:

1. Don't Practice in the Ideal Test-Taking Environment

Chances are the venue where your test is administered will be full of distractions and frustrations. Other students may be making noises or fidgeting after they finish a given section, the rooms are often large and full of posters and other kinds of reading material, and the list goes on. The best way to prepare for this is type of situation is to take practice tests in a similar environment. Since the actual venue will not be sterile and isolated, try to practice in an area with small distractions such as ambient noise or other people, like cafes or central rooms of libraries. This will allow you to be accustomed to the environment before actually arriving, which can make a world of difference.

Best,
Eric

PrepMe Senior Tutor

PrepMe's CEO Karan Goel was featured on the front page of BusinessWeek.com yesterday.

The slide show relates to a feature story entitled "The Afterlife of Business Plan Contest Winners" and there is an accompanying slide show. If you're wondering where the photo is taken, it's just outside our office at the wonderful University of Chicago Graduate School of Business' Hyde Park Center.

I joined PrepMe part-time after we won The University of Chicago's New Venture Challenge and it's been an amazing journey since. We launched our own technology in September 2005 and have grown by leaps and bounds ever since. We will keep you updated on what we are up to next and we promise to update the blog more often now!

As always, thank you to our students, their parents, our friends, advisors, and family for their support. Thank you to all the reporters and publications that have generously covered our story of how we're changing test prep by focusing on high-quality, customized materials. Every student deserves the benefits of a private tutor and we hope we can make it accessible to everyone.

Best,
Sammy

PrepMe Lead Engineer

Dear Friends,

Thank you to all of you for your support this past year and a half as we've built PrepMe into a strong company with great results for our students and their families.

You already know we're not ones to shy away from shameless plugs and publicity, so here goes. We have been selected for Business Week's Best Entrepreneurs Under 25 and they have live online voting to determine who they will feature in detail. We would really appreciate if you would vote for us.

Read: PrepMe Profile
Vote: The Ballot

We would love if you voted for: Avichal Garg, Karan Goel, Joe Jewell (PrepMe)

That is the 7th choice down. Please forward this to your friends, family, and co-workers as well.

Thanks,
Avichal, Joe, and Karan
PrepMe Co-Founders

I am proud to announce that we have officially launched our new Precocious Program. For the first time ever, 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th 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