Featured Test Prep Student Joshua Divaker (Abington Senior HS)

Joshua Divaker, a junior at Abington Senior High School, is a motivated student. He gets good grades, and is involved in service organizations and the track team. But when it came time to study for the SAT, Josh had difficulty staying focused. He had tried working through test prep materials on his own, but after taking a few practice SATs and being disappointed by his scores, Josh decided he was ready to commit to a structured tutoring program. His older sister had been happy with the test prep she received at A+ several years earlier, so he decided to give it a shot. â€Å"Having a personal tutor incentivized me to do the work and prepare each week,† Josh said. â€Å"I wanted to make a good impression on the tutors.† Using Josh’s diagnostic SAT as a baseline, the tutors set score improvement goals for him. He had the most room to improve on the Critical Reading section. Josh struggled quite a bit with time management on the Critical Reading section, so his verbal tutor, Kathy Astrue, taught him several strategies for reading passages more efficiently. She also worked with him to strengthen his vocabulary, as well as his knowledge of word roots and prefixes. By the second session, Kathy said, Josh had already met his score goal on the Critical Reading section. â€Å"Josh continued to flourish in the program and his practice test scores kept improving,† she said. C. J. Sich was Joshua’s math tutor. â€Å"Josh is a hardworking student,† she said. â€Å"The positive attitude he brought to the tutoring sessions made the whole process enjoyable: I could tell that he was internally motivated to raise his score on the SAT. He always did his homework, asked questions, and came prepared to the sessions.† With guidance from his A+ tutors, Josh approached test day with new confidence. He reported that he had much less anxiety due to all of the practice tests he had completed, and it paid off: Joshua’s SAT score increased by 200 points! â€Å"All of the advice I got from tutors relieved a lot of stress,† Josh said. â€Å"My score went up 200 points. The tutors really helped me focus. When I tried test prep before, I was not as dedicated. With A+, since I had to do the work to prepare for tutoring sessions, I got it done.†