Online Prep Course

You probably know by now that I live in a small town, far from those SAT prep schools.  I am not sure if I would have the time to take my son to those classes even if there were some nearby because I am a single father and have a full time job, and my older son does not have a driver’s license, yet.  When I was preparing for college, I was told that SAT is not something you can study for.  Well, Mr. Kaplan’s gospel had not reached my small town, then.  Now many students prepare for SAT and do well.  In helping my son, there are two choices: buy the Blue Book by College Board or go online.

During his summer vacation, I started my son studying the Blue Book.  He hates it.  He really does.  It is monotonous.  I have him do reading comprehension, or the critical reading part.  He does one or two sections each week.  He still has a lot of time before the actual SAT so I am letting him go slowly. I do’nt want him to burn out before the actual SAT.  I will discuss on this topic more later, and let’s move on to the second option that we have.

Online prep courses can be very effective, especially the writing part.  I have not had my son enroll in any online courses, yet, so I am giving my ideas to you here without any experience.  If someone misses certain types of math problems, he needs to practice many similar problems in order to be comfortable.  For the reading and sentence completion parts, I think most people can do it alone.  My son is doing it alone.  He just needs to read a lot of passages and answer questions from those passages.  However, the writing part requires the help of teachers.  Writing essays with same mistakes over and over does not help anybody improve writing.  Someone needs to point out the mistakes and help correct them.  This can be done offline and that is probably more effective.  But what if you don’t have someone to help your children with writing in person?

Using an online prep course in writing seems very similar to what we do at school.  We get an essay topic, write about it, turn it in and the teacher hands the essay back to us, pointing out mistakes with suggestions on correcting them.  I have not tried any online prep courses, so I do not know exactly how they are run, but I think they do it quite similar to the way we do it offline, like in school.  You get a topic to write on, write an essay, turn it in and then get a response on the website or maybe in e-mail.  Check out this site to get an idea.  The only problem may be finding the right web site and the right tutor on that web site.  Please make suggestions if you have had experience with any online writing courses, or any type of online SAT prep courses.

Linked web site is only used as an example and I neither endorse nor disapprove it.