Educational Training & Consulting for Educators

teacher-in-front-of-class-smallerA-List knows education and test prep and we've expanded our services to bring this knowledge and expertise to schools and educators. We can provide any number of academic services depending on your institution's needs:

  • Professional Development: Members of A-List's staff set up training sessions with your faculty in order to give teachers a solid grounding in the content of the SAT and/or ACT
  • Content Licensing: We can license our extensive suite of SAT and ACT education materials for use in classrooms
  • Course Support & Data Analysis: We can offer our assistance and expertise as you run your own SAT/ACT course, helping with every step along the way from planning a course schedule to evaluating test results
  • Program Development: A-List experts can help your school or organization develop and run a test preparation or academic program on any of the following course matter: SSAT, SAT, ACT, College Essay Workshop, Core Skills, Regents

What are the benefits of an A-List training course?

  • Private SAT preparation classes can cost $700 to over $1000 per student for a course that lasts only a few weeks. Subsidizing the cost will shift the payment burden away from the students, who may not be able to afford the best courses.
  • Holding courses during the school day makes it easier for students to attend without sacrificing time for schoolwork, sports, or extracurricular activities
  • The school's sponsorship of the classes will make students take the work more seriously than they would independent classes, which are often viewed as extracurricular and therefore optional.
  • Training the faculty in SAT subject matter will create a new level of valuable expertise in the staff, an expertise that can provide a significant return on professional development year after year.

Why is an SAT/ACT Course Important?

Regardless of one's opinion about college entrance exams, these tests are still an enormously important event in a student's academic life. While a student's GPA is extremely important in the college admissions process, a bad SAT score can tarnish an otherwise impressive record and can mean the difference between a top-tier school and a second-tier school. Furthermore, hitting an SAT/ACT target score can often qualify a student for scholarships or help recruited athletes get into the best programs. Helping students get the highest possible SAT score is in everyone's best interests.

The SAT and ACT are unique academic experiences. While students are expected to have a solid grasp of a certain number of concepts that they should have learned in school—such as mathematical formulas, vocabulary, or grammatical rules—much of the test is not content based at all, but rather tests a student's reasoning ability. It's less about what you know than about how you apply it.

This can make it difficult to address SAT/ACT subjects within the context of a normal class in school, because content is the primary goal of most classes. By the time most students take the SAT, their math classes are teaching concepts far beyond what they will need on the test. English classes in school often focus on literature, specific books and literary history, while the SAT/ACT tests general reading comprehension without testing any specific literary knowledge.