Who's Your ACT Tutor? You Have One, Right...?

Who's your ACT tutor? How often do you go to your tutor? What other successful kids went to he/she? How much ACT homework do you have? How experienced is your tutor? What kind of results are you getting? Where'd you hear about your tutor? A tutor is expensive and time consuming, but this is what you need if you're going to compete with the students that attend New Trier.

I just read this article. And the funny thing about it was, I wasn't even searching for an article about New Trier! I looked up "highest act scores from high schools" and this article, talking about a student from New Trier who received a 36 on their ACT popped up. New trier and Stevenson high school produce the most amount of kids that receive a 36 on their ACT.

"That pressure to eke out any extra point on the ACT has spawned a growing industrymarketing the prospect of improved ACT scores. An Internet search for "ACT test preparation" yields pages of results ranging from $20 practice test books to $1,000 five-week courses touting guaranteed four-point score increases." Writes Johnothan Bullington. ACT companies market towards schools like ours, where the pressure is high and our parent's salaries are higher. Academic Approach (an ACT tutoring company) isn't setting up shop in a lower-income South Side neighborhood, they're going to make themselves available to an area where the parents are willing to pay $160 a session for their kids to get ahead.

Schools in lower-income neighborhoods tend to have other things marketed towards them. Recruits from the military would never come to New Trier for the same reason: it isn't worth their time. My father grew up in a small town where practically every boy he knew was planning on going into the army because that was their best option. A lot of parents in this lower-income area went into the army so for the kids there that is the norm. The parents also usually don't make enough money to put their kids through college. Recruits wouldn't benefit from coming to New Trier because the students here usually aren't considering going into the army. I don't know one person from Winnetka that didn't go to college after high school. 

Every weekday when I go home I have to do my homework, but thats not the only academic- related thing I have to do. I also have to do my "daily reader," a form of torture given to me by my ACT tutor that my parents pay to improve my score. She's not messing around though, after taking the act in September, tutoring twice a week for a month and then taking it again in October, my friend raised her score by 2 points! I know a girl who raised hers by 7 points all together. With the help of 2 tutors, one for all around skills and a separate one just for math. What about you? Who's your tutor?