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