About Us
Advantage Testing regards standardized tests as opportunities for students to learn important skills both for the tests themselves and for life. If students prepare properly, their tutoring and testing experiences foster quantifiable results and spur academic achievement. Our long-term, rigorous, and carefully designed approach to learning seeks to go this far, and further. We work hard to instill education's most enduring and profound rewards:
- self-confidence
- academic growth
- joy in learning
- intellectual curiosity
Toward these ends, private tutoring serves as a uniquely powerful educational tool. We adapt traditional methods of study and practice for the individual student. Creating a positive environment that simultaneously challenges and supports, our tutors teach students to study not just intensively but effectively.
Our Approach to Learning
- Long-term: Depending on an individual student's needs and goals, our programs may span a year or more. True cognition involves phases of digestion, application, and repetition that take time, both during and between teaching sessions. The benefits of such productive work, of course, become long-term as well.
- Rigorous: Advantage Testing students work hard. We teach the efficiencies of skill, knowledge, and sound reasoning rather than short cuts or tricks. Assignments, memorization, drills, and practice tests are crucial components of our programs.
- Comprehensive: For 25 years, we have continually refined and expanded our teaching materials and approaches. Our curricula and instruction reflect a depth and breadth born of experience and meticulous analysis. We try to prepare students for every foreseeable academic contingency.
- Practical: Learning in the abstract is hard at any age but especially difficult at younger ages. We design and implement concrete strategies with specific steps toward attainable goals. Practice itself is the backbone of our structured programs.
- Creative: Paradoxically, our structure permits extensive creativity. Each student responds to a distinctive style of teaching, but all benefit from enjoying and contributing to the process. Our mnemonic approach to learning vocabulary, for example, encourages students and teachers to create idiosyncratic word associations and stories ranging from the serious to the seriously silly; these associations make the dictionary definitions more memorable and the learning experience more fun.
Our Tutors
Advantage Testing is a group of educators specializing in academic tutoring and test preparation. Our faculty consists primarily of high honors graduates of leading colleges and universities. Many hold graduate or professional degrees. Of the hundreds of applications we receive regularly, we select only a few dozen for interviews and ultimately hire just a few. As Crain's New York Business noted in 2003, "This year, 900 people applied for positions at tutoring firm Advantage Testing. Five were hired."
Our instructors are:
- effective motivators who encourage students of every background and ability to achieve their highest possible scores
- experienced, dedicated educators who receive outstanding teaching evaluations
- energetic, informal, and approachable mentors who establish productive relationships with their students
- skilled test-takers who must score in the top 1% (99th percentile) on any standardized test they teach for us
- students themselves of the continuously evolving science of standardized test construction