Patrick lives in upstate New York and was a sophomore when I started working with him in February, 2023. His first ACT English score was a 22, getting 48 questions right and 27 wrong.
Four months later, after some on-again-off-again tutoring, he scored a 35: 73 questions right and 2 wrong.
He’s right on the precipice of scoring his first perfect 36.
How did he come this far?
In his first two weeks with me, Patrick’s score didn’t move - he was stuck at a 22.
He now admits that he wasn’t really studying his flashcards 100% in the method that I taught him, and he wasn’t doing it every day like I’d assigned him to.
I caught that in the tutoring during our first month and showed him why the little corners he was cutting were having a major impact on his score. He realized he needed to "tighten his screws" a bit.
From then on, he fully applied the memorization methods. His score began to shoot up: a 28 by April, a 32 by May, and a 34 and 35 on his last two Sections this June.
“[The flashcards] are really helpful,” Patrick said, “but you just have to be consistent in doing them. You can't get discouraged if, early on, you only get half of them right. You can't be discouraged by that. You just have to keep doing it.”
As he kept going, his belief in himself grew: “I was just confident in it. I kept getting more and more right.”
Which of the cards were most helpful to Patrick? “The comma ones are really helpful. It’s easy to know when it’s a comma question and it’s easy to remember which rule it is.”
I asked Patrick how it would have gone if he had tried to memorize the cards on his own without the help of my tutoring.
“I don't think I would have had some of the things drilled into my head as much. Like the prediction steps, and just going over the answers a second time, the critiques and stuff. I think that’s really helpful.”
And finally, doing these grammar Sections has become fun! His face lit up when he shared, “When I jumped from 31 to 34, it was like, ‘OK, now I can get a 36!’”
No matter what type of question shows up, he feels like he knows exactly how to handle it.
In the end, Patrick’s advice to students considering using the flashcards: “just keep doing them. Even if you’re getting like three or four of the 90 cards correct, you can still make progress and just keep doing them.”
Take it from him, a student who’s raised his ACT English score 13 points from 22 to 35 and is about to get his first perfect 36 any day now.