Interview Story - Time You Failed

When I was working as a GMAT Test Prep Instructor for Ivy Business, I was approached with a meaningful opportunity to run a summer SAT prep class for inner-city students.

I felt this was an incredible chance to give back to my adopted city of Baltimore.

The program was going to be a pilot, run over 10 weeks, using standard Kaplan SAT prep textbooks, with Ivy Business considering developing their own materials in the future.

After the initial SAT practice exam, I discovered that among my twelve students, eight were performing around the 30th percentile of test-takers, while the remainder scored between the 50th and 70th percentile.

Over the first few classes, I focused on working through the lessons provided by Kaplan the textbook.

We would work through a set of test questions, and explore the logic behind why these questions were asked and how to solve them. I also worked through test-taking strategy, and how to eliminate obvious wrong answers, and make logical guesses based on what was left.

By about halfway through the course, I discovered that this approach wasn’t working.

Most of my students were lacking background knowledge in algebra and vocabulary. Even “eliminating the obvious choices” didn’t work well as a test-taking strategy.

I spent the remaining classes teaching some of these basic algebra concepts that were missing for the lower-scoring students, accepting that my higher-scorers wouldn’t get many benefits.

At the end of the session, my students took a retest.

For the 8 students who scored on the lower end on the first practice exam, I noticed a small increase of about 30-50 points while the students on the higher end scored about the same or even a little lower.

Unfortunately, my students didn’t see the gains in their score that I would have hoped. And though I recognize it was a pilot, and there were some small improvements, I just wish I could have done more for these students.

Both Ivy Business and the community organization hosting my students were happy with the pilot. Though I moved on to another job, they continued with the partnership. On my recommendation, they began using a different set of materials more focused on fundamentals.