Tutoring For All Ages

You’ve been planning for this; you’ve studied and practiced and studied some more, and now the thing is tomorrow. The big test, those all-important pages that will determine your future education. You crack open your study guide (for the last time, hopefully) and start to review.

You notice a question that stumps you for a minute or two, and you go review that topic. And since you’re reviewing that, you might as well double-check a few other things. How many practice quizzes will it take for you to beat your top score? And while you’re checking answers, you see the vocab list and realize that you don’t know at least half the words on it. Panic! You studied and studied, memorized all kinds of vocab, but what if none of it is on the test? What if they ask about that algebra concept you never quite mastered? There’s not much time left! But at least you have the nighttime hours to cram as much knowledge as you can into your head. So you’d better put on a pot of coffee and get down to studying, right?

Wrong — and stop, just stop. Take a deep breath before you do something you will most definitely regret when you wake up, mind in a fog, to a drool-covered test booklet and an empty answer sheet at the end of section 3. (more…)

Online resources for the SAT and PSAT abound, but free, easy-to-access help for students taking the SSAT and ISEE is not as readily available. To help remedy this, we have launched a Podcast devoted to helping students improve their SSAT and ISEE scores.

The podcast, entitled “SSAT and ISEE Lessons from Abacus,” is listed on iTunes: subscribe by clicking here. If you do not have iTunes or if that link does not work, you can manually subscribe to the URL
http://www.abacuslearning.com/podcast/SSAT_ISEE_podcast.rss .

It is our hope that through this podcast we will be able to help students we would not otherwise meet due to geographical or budgetary concerns. However, if you live in Southern California and would like to arrange a meeting or if you would like to arrange a long-distance phone/video session, please contact us so that we can arrange a time. Or, contact us if you have a question that you’d like our next podcast to answer!

April isn’t just tax month. It’s also admissions month. Even with midterms barely gone, finals are looming on the horizon. Students everywhere are entering into the busiest time of the year. For some, it’s the beginning of the end: for our Abacus students who have already jumped through the hoops and now find themselves having to choose between their top choices for college (a happy conundrum), we’d like to offer our congratulations.

If you’re not quite there yet, and you have a lot on your plate this spring, we can help. We can meet with you to help you plan out a practical course of independent study, or we can work with you every step of the way. Our private tutoring services are completely customizable. Just let us know what you need!

You’ve still got leftover turkey in the fridge, finals are approaching, and you’re about to start a well-deserved break from school. You may be thinking that studying is the last thing you want to do during your break, but if you’re taking a standardized test in the spring, now is a great time to catch up on all that vocab you know you should have been working on all fall.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: a large and diverse vocabulary is the fastest and easiest route to a great verbal score on your PSAT/SAT/ACT/SSAT/ISEE/take-your-pick.

Improving your vocab doesn’t have to require hours of work per day, and it doesn’t necessarily have to feel like work. (more…)

Every parent and student out there is looking for the path to a great score on a standardized test. And there are so many tutors and tutoring companies out there selling the one-and-only-best-product or method to get you that score that it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t.

Of course, we at Abacus are yet another company using a set of methods and principles that we know works. But we also don’t think that you should have to pay thousands of dollars for access to all of it. So, we’ve collected a set of basic tools for achieving your best score on a standardized test:

1. The tests are standardized. That means that the principles described here will work for the SAT as well as the PSAT, ACT, SSAT, ISEE, GRE, or whatever standardized test you have to take.

   But it goes further than that. Standardized tests always have an element of predictability, which you can use to your advantage. Learn the structure of the test in advance, so that you know what to expect. Never go into a test cold and expect to get your best score. (more…)