Tutoring For All Ages

Abacus has been helping students learn to love learning since 2001. Whether you're looking for general subject tutoring, standardized test prep, or both, look no further.

Below you will find news updates as well as articles on test preparation and general study tips. To the right, browse our offerings and other information, like our two Word of the Day feeds.

And if you have any questions, please feel free to use the page at right to contact us.

We hear a lot of reasons for why students don’t like to write down their intermediate steps on standardized tests. Sure, it may not be necessary to show your work in the same detail as when you’re graded on that work, but you should think twice before leaving your test booklet blank. Our most commonly-heard excuse is:

Habit. It’s just what I’ve always done.

Now, sometimes this is just another way of saying, I’ve never been allowed to do it. Students taking statewide standardized tests aren’t always allowed to write in their test booklets. That’s because some schools re-use their test booklets from year to year, and erasing is time-consuming and can be damaging to the paper. (Whether or not we think that’s a good policy is a subject for another post.) So when students go from using separate scratch paper to having no separate scratch paper at all, they often just think they’re not supposed to write anything down.

If this sounds familiar to you, know that the ACT, AP, ISEE, SAT, and SSAT exams all expect that you’ll be using your test booklet as scratch paper. Part of your test fee is paying for that test booklet, which will be thrown away after you take the test. So, write away!

But for those students who are just in the habit of doing all their work in their head, consider the adage: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Students often think that just because nobody will be checking their work on a standardized test, that means they won’t be punished for leaving the test booklet free of scratch work. To that end, we’re continuing our series on the most common reasons that students fail to “show their work” on standardized test day:

Pride. I should be able to go without.

We see this a lot from students who are taking a test that they expect to get a high score on, and it’s also a favorite excuse from people who like to get to an answer fast.

Unfortunately, standardized tests don’t care about your ego or your impatience. You don’t get bonus points for turning in a blank test booklet, or for turning it in early. If you missed a negative sign, no one but you is going to know that you made a simple, careless error. Careless errors get the same score as errors of knowledge or understanding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s SAT Question of the Day is a double-blank sentence completion:

Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

The play, which features —— mix of comedy, pathos, and music, was correctly described by one honest critic as a ——.

A) a seamless . . debacle
B) an ungainly . . hodgepodge
C) an unfortunate . . masterpiece
D) an inappropriate . . success
E) a harmonious . . failure

It’s a question that, in some ways, hinges on one word: honest. A theater critic would have no reason not to be honest if they were reviewing a good play. So it’s likely that it was a bad play, so we should look for answer choices that reflect that.

However, even if you missed that clue word, you could still figure out the right answer from the other clue words (play, mix, correctly, and critic). Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to homework and in-school tests, the vast majority of our students don’t have to be reminded to show their work (at least, not more than once or twice). Getting credit in school isn’t usually about getting the right answer; it’s about demonstrating that you know how to get the right answer.

But when it comes to standardized tests, many of the same students, who painstakingly write out every line of algebra or underline every important line in their history textbook, won’t touch pencil to paper except to fill in a bubble. We’ve yet to see a student who can get away with doing it on every question of a test — it inevitably leads to careless mistakes.

And yet, sometimes a student, despite just having seen the results of those careless mistakes, continues to leave a blank workspace again and again while working through practice problems.

Why does this happen? There are likely many reasons, but we’ll address a few of the more likely causes in a series of posts, starting with:

Time. If I write out my work, I won’t be able to finish the whole test.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, it’s the middle of December, and you’ve got a pile of blank applications staring you in the face. All that mostly-white paper is begging you for answers, and you aren’t really sure what you’re going to say. The pressure to dazzle is overwhelming, and you sit for hours at your computer, staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. How to break this applicant’s block?

Conventional wisdom for breaking writer’s block is to just write something, anything, and keep writing until the creative juices are flowing and the real answers you seek come naturally. But we’ve learned over the years to question this wisdom, or at least to recognize that there are other ways to really get started, ways that work better for some students.  Read the rest of this entry »