Ace In-Home Tutoring

To Mrs. Evans: I recently read on the Thumbtack website your review of my tutoring sessions with your son. I must say, that was a bit of a surprise. I found your review to be altogether mean-spirited, baseless, and potentially libelous. Regarding my tutoring methods, when you first contacted me, I told you on the phone the exact plan and strategy that I intended to use with your son to try to help him do better on the ACT. This is the very same strategy that I have been using with my students for over the past two decades. I told you that, in short, I intended to 1) work on the layout and scoring of the ACT with your son, and 2) I planned to help your son learn about, and hopefully master, certain basic, practical, proven test-taking strategies for scoring higher on the test, and 3) I also planned to help your son learn more about key content areas that the test-makers traditionally like to focus on, and 4) I intended to have your son practice with full-length ACT tests so that he could get a better understanding of just what kinds of questions he was likely to find on the test when he would take it for real. Furthermore, I mentioned to both you and your son that I would be giving homework assignments to your son from these full-length practice ACT tests, and that my focus in the following sessions would be to zero in on any questions that your son missed, and that I would be breaking these problems down and analyzing them for your son in order to give him a better idea of what he could have done differently on those particular problems to have had a better chance of coming up with the correct answer, and also to give him a better chance of answering that kind of question correctly when he might see a rather similar question on the actual test. (Even though the test-makers state that they never use the same exact question more than once, they definitely have certain themes that they like to revisit, and if students can become more familiar with these themes, with these kinds of questions, they have a better chance of improving their scores when they take the test for real.) All of the above spells out the exactly what I told you were my plans and strategies for working with your son, in trying my best to help him raise his test scores. You listened to everything that I had to say, and then you made a decision to hire me based on what you heard. And what I told you that I was going to do is, in fact, exactly what I did, and now you are claiming that my tutoring, to quote you, “provided no structure and no strategy for taking practice tests”?! And you give me one star out of five on the Thumbtack rating system, which is the absolute lowest possible rating? Your claims, besides being incredibly spiteful, are downright preposterous. If Jimmy is the type of student who is actually cut out for Ivy League schools, or any other very competitive colleges and universities, and if what you say were somehow true, I am surprised that he wouldn’t have noticed after the first tutoring session, or at least after the second, that I had “no strategy” and “no structure” –to once again quote you--for helping him get ready for his test. He never mentioned anything of the sort to me, however, and, as far as I know, he never mentioned anything of the sort to you, either, as I am pretty sure that, if he had you, would have wanted to talk to me about that and / or just cancelled any remaining tutoring sessions. But you didn’t. Nothing of the sort ever came up. Thus, from all that I can tell, it seems that Jimmy was quite satisfied with my tutoring, at least at the time that it was occurring. Perhaps he took a different view of it after the fact, but at the time he never indicated that he had a problem with anything that I was doing. Thus, it makes me wonder if even though the tutoring was in fact going according to plan, then could it be that you and / or Jimmy are just looking to find a scapegoat when Jimmy’s test scores, perhaps, turned out to be less than he, and you, had hoped for? And you end up deciding that the thing to do is to blame the tutor? Really??? Over the past two decades or so, I have worked with thousands of students, most of whom—along with their parents-- were quite happy with the tutoring that I provided. Not once in all that time have I ever received the sort of review that you wrote on the Thumbtack.com website. Not once. That’s not to say that every single student and their parents were thrilled with the tutoring, but almost all of them realized that if their test scores weren’t quite what they had been hoping for, they generally understood that it wasn’t for a lack of trying, either on my part or their part. Before we got started on the tutoring, Jimmy showed me his score report on the ACT, which indicated that he had a 22 overall—out of 36-- which is just slightly above the median score. This score of 22 puts him at around the 54th percentile. When I found out that Jimmy had plans to apply to both Harvard and Yale, among other Ivy League schools, I was extremely surprised. To be perfectly frank, I don’t end up working with many students who are applying to both Harvard and Yale, and when I do end up working with these students, they generally come to me with some ACT and / or SAT scores that are already very, very strong. And when I am talking about strong scores, I means SAT scores of 1400 or better, and ACT scores of at least 28 or better. These sorts of scores typically put these students into the 90th percentile or above, meaning that they are in at least the top ten percent of all scorers on these tests. And even these scores are no guarantee that they will get into schools such as Harvard or Yale. If you talk to any serious tutor about this, or any serious person who analyzes test scores for a living, or if you read through the literature put out by the organizations behind both the SAT and the ACT, you will find that the probability of a student going from around the 50th percentile or so on the ACT or SAT to a score in the 90th percentile or so is very, very low. Basically, it hardly ever happens, except in some sort of rare cases. I realize that due to the 36-point scoring system for the cumulative ACT score, going from a 22 to a 30 is “only” a total of 8 points, and 8 points seems to most people to be a rather small number, so it seems as though it shouldn’t be a big deal, and shouldn’t be all that hard to do, but that is just an illusion, and it almost never happens. Of course, when I am tutoring my students, I never say that a certain score is out of the question, but I do try to explain to them that certain things, scoring-wise, are more likely than others. Some students come to me with very conservative scoring goals, while others come to me with much more aggressive scoring goals. The more aggressive the goal—say going from a 22 to a 30 cumulative score on the ACT—the more difficult it is to reach. Mind you, that’s not to say that it’s “impossible,” but it is demonstrably harder to reach those sorts of goals. With all of this in mind, I tend to just try to do my best, and let the chips—and test scores--fall where they may. Furthermore, you also mentioned in your review that I told your son that “academic schools are not worth their weight.” Well, that’s just flat-out wrong. It is entirely possible, however, that I did mention to your son that there are a lot of good schools out there besides, say, just Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Cornell and so on. When your son showed me the complete list of schools that he was applying to, I was, just to repeat, quite surprised by how top-heavy his list was with schools that are extremely difficult to get into, even if one already has very good grades, and even if, on top of that, one is being recruited by the athletic departments of these schools. Even though I don’t come across this sort of situation all that often, when I do come across it I tend to take a short break from tutoring in order to give my students some very basic advice on the whole issue of college admissions. Basically, I simply tell my students that while it is fine to apply to some “reach” schools, they really need to be sure to also apply to some “safety” schools as well. And I can guarantee that this is going to be exactly the same advice that almost all the guidance counselors at your son’s school give to their charges, and this is also the exact same advice that you will get from any of the various high-priced “educational consultants” who ply their trade in this area, if you bother to ask them. Furthermore, even though I make my living helping students prepare for the SAT and ACT, I try to remind my students—and sometimes their parents—that when it comes to a college education, it really doesn’t matter just what school you go to as long as you make up your mind to work hard and learn something wherever you end up. It really comes down to the student, and not how famous the college or university is. The tales are legion of bright students who get into very competitive schools and then spend all their time partying once they get there; on the other hand, there are also lots of stories of students who go to much less prestigious schools, but are strongly determined that they are going to get a good education, and end up making great strides in their learning, and end up doing very well. And as for your claim that I didn’t prepare your son for the SAT along with the ACT, even though you had asked me to, well, all that I can say is that when you are preparing for one of those tests, you are also preparing for the other. Also, according to my records, I only met with your son for a total of six sessions, and I don’t think that that really gave me a whole lot of time to transition over to SAT prep. (Edited for length...)