“Our Proprietary Curriculum is Your Competitive Advantage”

Overview:

At College Track Services, our proprietary curriculum gives our students a competitive advantage in SAT preparation. This knowledge will also carry over to the classroom, improving learning and grade performance in our students. The SAT is a reasoning test, assessing students’ fundamental reasoning abilities in math, reading, and writing. These fundamental skills are the foundation for academic success.

At CTS, we understand the complex design of SAT questions. SAT’s are not simply examinations of the presence of knowledge. Nor are SAT’s like school tests, which are designed to make sure that a student has learned the subject and can apply the knowledge. Instead, each question is a ‘mini puzzle’ that must be figured out. SAT questions are not applications of knowledge, processes, or formulas. An SAT question is far more complex and nuanced than anything that appears on a school test. Therefore, the SAT is a test of cleverness, much more akin to an IQ test than to a school test.

This complex “puzzle decoding” skill is one of the hardest to build in a student, and so most SAT companies don’t really try. Instead, other companies choose to treat students’ reasoning skills as unchangeable, and instead focus on test-taking strategies. In doing so, they usually end up treating the SAT as a mysterious, unknowable black box; something a student cannot hope to understand or master. In their view, the best their education can hope to offer are test taking strategies, essentially gambling for some small score improvement. At CTS, we offer an alternative to our students: a deeper understanding of SAT questions, and in return we get markedly improved performance.

Transparent Training:

There is no mystery or “black box” element to our training process. Students get a deep and thorough understanding of how to solve every SAT problem, from the most simple to the most difficult. Many SAT prep programs simply teach students the process of elimination, a method we find to be slow, unreliable and even faulty. Instead, CTS students systematically master the methods and skills needed for SAT Excellence. Our methods have helped students achieve perfect scores in individual sections and perfect scores overall. At each phase, students will understand what is being taught, why it relates to SAT excellence, and they are also building and refining their own abilities to assess and answer questions.

Progressive Training:

The CTS curriculum provides a systematic way to enhance SAT testing performance. More specifically, this curriculum requires a student’s brain to develop key analytical skills, even if the student has struggled in a certain subject for years.Our curriculum works for all student types. The CTS curriculum teaches tools that refocus our students’ way of thinking. Students who come to CTS will leave smarter.

Responsive Methods:

This is more difficult to administer and develop than a standard curriculum of lecture, demonstration, examination. However, it is more effective, both in terms of score improvement and in terms of intellectual development. It allows students to spend time on their weakest areas, and thus gain maximum time efficiency. Bottom line:

1. CTS programs teach students to solve the problems which other competitors may suggest they skip.

2. CTS programs insure that students master all relevant concepts and progress steadily from beginner to advanced levels.

3. CTS programs not only include test-taking strategies, but also the most effective techniques to answer correctly all SAT questions.

4. CTS programs build core reading and math skills, which spill over into high school academics and grades.

5. CTS advanced courses (i.e., 2100 Club) teach significantly advanced material to provide students with a superior edge in taking the SAT.

6. CTS programs teach thinking methods, not just test answers and rules, including factoring methods and reverse substitution, combinatorics, prime factorization and core logic rules.

Each student will take a 100 point diagnostic test before each class. This test identifies educational gaps in a student’s math, reading, and grammar foundation, and is not a multiple choice test. Any holes discovered during this prerequisite testing are areas of concern, and must be addressed immediately. Just a single hole in the prerequisites can lead to a loss of 100 or more points on the SAT. Therefore, any problem the student misses in the diagnostic test is a major red flag.

Students will take a practice SAT every other week during their class schedule. They will also be given the opportunity to participate in a question and answer period to address specific problems and concerns.