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You don’t want your money back. You want your child to stop needing SAT prep, so we don’t offer a traditional money-back guarantee. We offer results!

If your student follows the plan we prescribe, we keep working with them until they get the score.

That commitment depends on the student actually doing all parts of the system that we determine they need. If certain foundational skills, modules, practice, testing, or support are recommended, those pieces cannot simply be skipped to save time or money while expecting the same result.

We take responsibility for building the plan and delivering what we prescribe. You are responsible for following that plan rather than self-selecting which parts you want to complete.

If you choose not to follow our recommendations, you can absolutely still work with us, but you will pay for the services your student uses and the results guarantee will no longer apply.

Our programs are expensive compared with much of the SAT-prep market, but the work is also much bigger than ordinary SAT prep. If a student can repair years of math weakness in six months while moving toward the score they need, that is not the same product as buying a few tutoring hours, which may or may not change their score at all.

That being said, every single program is completely customized based on your child’s diagnostic score with us. Even group programs do not all start with the same needs. You only pay for what you need.

The lower your student is starting or the faster you want the results, the more expensive it will be. So you will be given some say in speed and budget, and we get you results based on those choices.

Yes, but in general, the lower your budget, the slower the process and the more you will need to rely on group support rather than private tutoring.

There is a famous rule in service-based industries that says you can get things fast, cheap, or high quality, but you can only pick two.

For the sake of transparency, though, none of our programs are really “cheap.” If budget is a massive constraint, we may simply not be the right program for you.

For some students considering less selective colleges, a strong SAT score can also create opportunities for merit scholarships that may offset some or even all of the cost of test prep, but there is no truly cheap option here.

Our options are more like

1. 1.Expensive.
2. 2.More affordable than expensive, but still not cheap.

We don’t offer fast and cheap, because we aren’t willing to sacrifice quality, but other companies are. They will probably come with a money back guarantee as well ;)

The quality of results are always our top priority, and the timeline and cost are the variables that change.

We are good, but we are not miracle workers. How long this takes depends heavily on where your student is starting, how aggressively you want to move, and if you’re willing to pay for speed.

If a student is starting around a 400 in SAT Math, they may need six months or more because we first have to repair years of foundational weaknesses before SAT-level work will stick. 4–6 years of math weakness repaired in 6 months is still extremely impressive, but you understand that results like that genuinely take time.

Reading foundations can usually be repaired faster, often within 2–3 months, before the student moves into the SAT Intensive, and sometimes even faster than that depending on the issues your child is facing with reading.

It also depends on your budget. We do have more affordable ways to work with us, such as through group programs, but the tradeoff is usually time. If you want the fastest possible results, that generally requires more intensive support and a larger investment.

All of our programs are self-paced, even our groups. We don’t let your child get dragged into the next unit because twelve other students are ready to move on, and we don’t make an advanced student sit through material they have already mastered.

If your child misses a class or needs more time on a module, then they continue working through the material they need until they are ready for the next step.

In general the intensive SAT course is designed to be completed in 90 days if you work on both Math and Verbal at the same time, but many choose not to undertake both at once if they have a lot of activities or a limited schedule.

Private lessons are completely customized to the individual, so this is the fastest way to progress through the modules if your child is very busy.

Students can spend months taking practice tests, working with tutors, watching explanations, and completing hundreds of questions while the same weaknesses keep showing up on every new test.

We built our methods to stop that cycle.

A student cannot nod through something they do not understand, borrow the tutor’s knowledge when they get stuck, or spend three hours practicing the things they already know just because those things feel easier.

We force the real weakness into the open and work on it until the student can handle it without us.

Because the goal is not to become really good at studying for the SAT. The goal is to get the score and be done.

Smart, hardworking students don’t need months of SAT prep. They need the right pieces, in the right order, working together toward the score.

Anyone can get a top 1% score. After getting such good results with top performers and so quickly, we wondered if we could take 4.0 students who had been stuck in the 1300s and 1400s and get them into the top 1% in just a handful of lessons… What would happen if we built the entire program around the same system and aimed to get the results for everyone?

Bluebook, prep books, Khan Academy, tutoring, maybe even another SAT program does not get them the result they are seeking. We built 1550+ to stop students from practicing around the same weaknesses for months—and actually eliminate them.

That idea became the foundation of 1550+, a curriculum built by a Johns Hopkins-trained educator and delivered by an entire team.

1550+ — Solving the age-old problem of how smart and hardworking students can spend months studying and still have an SAT score they don’t want.

If you are looking for Ivy League-educated, perfect-score tutors, then you are looking in the wrong place. If you have not already read our philosophy on who makes the best tutors, we suggest you READ THIS before going any further.

One reason we believe so strongly in our approach to tutor selection is because we believe that people who have struggled and overcome something are often the best people to guide someone else through the same struggle.

Imagine you wanted to lose weight and were choosing a coach. Would you rather work with someone who had been naturally slim their entire life, could seemingly eat whatever they wanted, and had never personally experienced the problem you were trying to solve?

Probably not.

You would want the person who had struggled with the same problem, lost the weight, understood what made the process difficult, kept the weight off, and had actually learned how to take another person through that journey.

We think about SAT tutors the same way.

We intentionally do NOT select the Ivy League, “1500-on-the-first-try” type of tutor simply because they scored well. Also, achieving something for yourself is not the same as being qualified to help others do it, but it is better than it coming naturally to you.

Tutors may understand the test extremely well, but if they have not traveled the road your student is trying to travel, then they are not truly the best guides to getting your child from start to finish. Those tutors we reserve for our program called The Last 100, for students looking to get the last 100 points on the SAT.

That said, we certainly do not put unqualified people in front of your child. Every 1550+ tutor goes through rigorous training inside our own curriculum and must pass multiple evaluations before being cleared to tutor students.

For private lessons, your tutor is assigned based on the student’s needs, fit, and tutor availability.

For group classes, the model is different. Students progress through modules, and each module is taught by tutors who have demonstrated complete mastery of that specific material. That means a student may work with different tutors as they progress through the program, and all of our choices of which tutors are placed where is completely intentional to achieve the best results for you.

We have helped countless students who came to us after working with big-name companies, local tutors, private tutors, and other SAT programs and still ended up stuck with mediocre (or sometimes nonexistent) results.

It happens, but the fact that a tutor or another company did not get your student the score does not mean their score is stuck in place. It usually means that whatever they were doing did not solve the actual problem(s) they had.

If the previous company gave you a score guarantee, cash in on it. Then make a different choice. We are not going to keep doing more of the same thing, and, honestly, we don’t even really think of ourselves as SAT tutors, but we have to call ourselves that or else you probably would never find us.

Our work is nothing like traditional tutoring or classroom teaching. We use an approach we call “The Method” (never said we were creative at naming things), which transfers 90% of the session into the student’s hands. They are guided and mentored through the entire session, but the method ensures that they are actively learning and connecting their knowledge to things that they already know.

You can read more about “The Method” here.

If your child wants a high SAT score, then this is right for them. If they are procrastinators, easily distracted, weak in school, it’s also right for them. If they are super-high achievers or even suffering from test anxiety, this is also right for them.

We just HONESTLY need to know which group your child falls in, because if they are easily distracted or lose motivation and have trouble with accountability, for example, we need to know that to make sure we are picking the program structure that will get them the results. Don’t sugar coat anything in our Parent Planning Session. We need to know the good, the bad, and the ugly so that we can make sure our recommendations are appropriate for their actual needs.

A student with a 520 and a student with a 1450 are typically stuck for completely different reasons, so we do not put them through the same SAT “tutoring” course. We diagnose each section separately and start the student only where their score shows they need help.

These are our general placement guidelines, but every program is still customized to the individual student:

1. 1.If your child scores under 600 in a section, they begin with Foundations in the specific weak areas they need. We do not make students spend time on material they have already mastered.
2. 2.If your child scores 600–730 in a section, they begin with the SAT Intensive for that section, or foundations if there is a blatantly weak area in their diagnostic.
3. 3.If your child scores 740 or higher in a section, they enter The Last 100 for that section.

Where we place a student ultimately depends on three things: what the diagnostic shows, how much time the student has, and the budget the family is working with.

Schedule your free diagnostic HERE if you have not already done so.