Thanks to Dr. Li’s prep class, I scored a 1580 on the November 2016 SAT, with a 790 in reading/writing, a 790 in math, and a 7/7/7 on the essay.

Before I signed up to attend Dr. Li’s summer SAT prep class, I was not confident about my ability to score well on the new SAT. I mainly struggled with the Math section—although the questions required math skills that I had learned in previous years, I lacked experience in seeing past the “tricks” and visualizing the best strategy to use to arrive at the answer. Also, whereas English has generally been one of my stronger subjects, I lacked experience with the type of analytical thinking required to score well on the Reading section and the essay.

Over the course of three weeks, Dr. Li’s prep class gave me the practice I needed to strengthen my ability in each of these sections. Dr. Li’s math class gave me extensive practice in familiarizing myself with the different types of questions that appear on the SAT and the strategies needed to solve them. He encouraged us to ask him about questions that we struggled with, and his clear explanations really helped me improve my score in the Math section.

The reading teachers, Mr. Calis and Mr. Sherron, taught us a variety of proven strategies for time management, eliminating wrong answers, and choosing the best answer out of several viable options. They reviewed numerous practice questions, guiding us through the thinking processes that led to the correct answers, which greatly clarified my understanding of the different types of questions found on the new SAT.

The writing teachers, Ms. Durand and Dr. Stanica, gave me a valuable understanding of how to write the essay. Class discussions helped me internalize a wide variety of literary devices to focus on when analyzing sample texts. I was able to practice many different ways to structure my essay and improve my writing using specific feedback tailored to my essays.

Lastly, Dr. Thomson, the grammar teacher, gave extremely clear explanations about the language conventions tested on the SAT. Not only did he show us which answers were correct when compared to the other choices, he often went into the history of the English language that led to those correct answers. His explanations helped me improve my ability to isolate the correct answer for questions I had not encountered before, and his lessons motivated me to pursue a greater understanding of language even beyond the SAT. In all, Dr. Li’s prep class played a key role in helping me to improve my testing ability in order to achieve my SAT score.