In March 2024, the SAT changed forever. The College Board launched the digital version of the SAT (DSAT) that marked a stark shift in the college test preparatory landscape. This change was inevitable, as more and more standardized tests have switched to a digital format.
If you are a tutor, you have most likely encountered the main differences between the DSAT and traditional paper SAT. The DSAT is a streamlined version of the original test. It was cut down to just 2 hours with 98 items in ELA and math, compared to 3 hours and 154 items on its paper SAT predecessor. The DSAT also became adaptive, adjusting to be slightly harder or slightly easier in a second section, helping students become less discouraged or bored by the questions on the standard test.
What some tutors don’t realize is that when the SAT became virtual, it wasn’t just the format that changed. Methods of preparing for the DSAT have evolved rapidly over the past few years alongside this new digital test. Tutors that continue to use analog strategies and tools will set students behind. We will explore how one tutoring company has adopted a new approach to DSAT tutoring that has enhanced their process, getting their students to their goal DSAT score faster, and pushing their organization to the top of the field.
Personalized Test Prep
As the DSAT clearly identifies, the world is changing, and students (and the things that are challenging them) are changing as well. If students are the variable in tutoring services, the answer to tutoring challenges is personalizing the test preparation. Every student is different: some students will take to certain processes, while others won’t. On top of this, their skills will range. Once you understand what those strengths, weaknesses, and approaches to learning are, you can customize what works for that student.
This, of course, is easier said than done. It may take a seasoned tutor 2-3 sessions to really get that ‘feel’ for how a student works. A traditional approach to tutoring might be to teach many testing strategies, finding what sticks with a student. You might use 5-10 hours to understand this when you meet 1-1 with a student. This is where Sonya Muthalia of Informed Decisions found herself when she decided to incorporate Mindprint, a cognitive assessment that identifies a student’s unique learning needs, into her work.
Incorporating Mindprint changed Sonya’s entire system. Imagine understanding where you will experience friction with a student’s learning, their learning plateaus, and what their strengths are before you even meet with them. With Mindprint, Sonya Muthalia already has the answers to the ever present ‘personalization’ question so she gets to start three steps ahead of other tutors. Understanding cognitive strengths and weaknesses allows her to focus on DSAT question prep that targets specific cognitive reasoning skills, which is information you get immediately from the test. This allows her to focus her instincts as a tutor to which approaches will best fit her student, based on the results. These informed decisions have resulted in a faster process than any other tutoring company in her field.
For example, if you know that a child struggles with visual reasoning, you can apply that very quickly to how you teach. Imagine a student aces 8th grade algebra, but he tanks geometry. There are hundreds of reasons as to why they could be doing poorly (maybe they are new to a school, maybe they struggle to pay attention) but if you know the specific reason is that he doesn’t process spatially, you can save hours of figuring out that “why” and move to addressing that issue.
Sonya was recently interviewed about her work using Mindprint: “Intuition alone is good, but intuition, backed by real data from the digital exam, is ten times more powerful and can reach a hundred times more students. That’s when the lightbulbs started going off. Intuition told us where to look, but the data allowed us to quantify and analyse behaviours in new ways. It has changed the whole practice of test prep for me.”
MindPrint
Mindprint comes out of Penn Medicine, grounded in the science of learning. It actually doesn’t look anything like the SAT or ACT test, because it’s built to break down how a learner learns, and it’s so accurate NASA uses it to test their astronauts. MindPrint measures across the core domains of executive functioning, complex reasoning, memory, and speed. The data provided after assessment will help parents and teachers support their students based on how they learn best.
The assessment takes less than an hour, is self administered, self paced, with a series of tasks. Tasks are anywhere from 2-9 minutes, and puzzles and challenges change drastically from task to task, which keeps students engaged.
You can learn more about how Mindprint works here.