SAT tutoring in New York City, built around your student.

What does the SAT look like now?

The SAT went fully digital in 2024, and a lot of what circulates from older siblings and parents who went through this a few years ago is already out of date. Here is the current test.

• It runs two hours and fourteen minutes, in the College Board’s Bluebook app, on a laptop or tablet at a test center.
• There are two sections, Reading and Writing and Math, each split into two modules. How a student does on the first module sets the difficulty of the second.
• Passages are short, one question each. The long passages with ten questions are gone, so students see many more topics and have to switch gears quickly.
• A Desmos graphing calculator is built into every math module. Students who know how to use it skip whole chunks of algebra. Most students we meet either don’t open it or use it to add.
• Scores run 400 to 1600. Most selective colleges superscore, combining the best section scores across sittings, though the exceptions include schools NYC families care about.

The math on the SAT is approachable. The reading is where the difficulty lives, including on the math section. Students lose points on problems they know how to solve because they didn’t read carefully enough to set them up. We wrote about what the SAT is actually testing because that pattern shows up at every score level.

How we prepare students for the SAT

There is no set curriculum. Each plan is built for one student, and it changes as the practice-test data comes in.

1. Diagnostic first. A full-length, timed SAT, ideally alongside an ACT diagnostic, so the choice between tests rests on the student’s own numbers and not on what a friend’s kid took. School grades do not predict test scores. A 4.0 student can walk in with a diagnostic that surprises everyone, and that is far better to learn in April than in October.
2. A plan where every test date has a job. We work backward from application deadlines and the college list as it stands. Which schools are test-required? Which superscore? Is the next gain likely to be sectional or global? Those answers decide whether the next sitting is worth taking.
3. Content and strategy together. The grammar rules the SAT tests and schools rarely teach. The ninth-grade math students have forgotten. The reading habits that decide the score: circling what the question is asking before solving, finding the sentence that proves the answer, knowing the six Desmos moves cold.
4. Practice tests, then error analysis. Every wrong answer gets sorted: content gap, careless mistake, timing, or misread. That diagnosis is the next session. Practice tests without this step are just more testing.
5. Homework that gets done. Assignments sit on a calendar in the KFT portal. Students work one question at a time and can flag guesses. Parents get a written recap after each session and a running score history.
6. The right tutor. More than ten tutors on our team teach the SAT. We match on subject strength, personality, schedule, and how the student learns, and Kate stays involved in the plan.

When should a student start SAT prep?

NYC families move earlier than most of the country because the admissions calendar here requires it. The sequence that works: take diagnostics in the spring of sophomore year, choose a test by early summer, do the bulk of the prep over the summer, and test in the fall of junior year. SAT dates run August through December, plus March, May, and June. A student who preps seriously over the summer can be done testing by the end of fall junior year and spend the rest of the year on grades.

How long the prep itself takes depends on the student.

Some students see significant improvement in seven to fifteen hours of tutoring. Others benefit from a longer engagement. The diagnostic tells us which, and we say so plainly before anyone commits. Our guide to when to start SAT and ACT prep walks through the tradeoffs.

Should my student take the SAT or the ACT?

The two tests are closer in length than they have ever been, and on almost everything else they are still different. The SAT is adaptive, gives more time per question, and leans on careful reading. The ACT is a pacing test with more straightforward questions and a broader math syllabus. Some students score meaningfully higher on one than the other because of format alone.

We don’t guess. Two full-length diagnostics in sophomore spring answer the question, and we walk families through the results side by side. If the ACT turns out to be the better fit, we teach that too: see our ACT tutoring in NYC.

Students we tutor for the SAT

• Students at NYC independent schools and specialized public high schools, in person across Manhattan and Brooklyn.
• Families outside the city, in the US and abroad, over video. Much of our practice already runs that way.
• Student-athletes whose recruiting timelines push testing earlier than the usual calendar.
• High achievers whose grades didn’t translate. Straight-A students make a predictable set of SAT and ACT prep mistakes, and we know what they are.
• Students with extended time or other accommodations. Our founder holds a professional certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity from the Landmark College Institute, and we can help guide the College Board accommodations process.

Where our students have been admitted, by year, is on our results page. Class of 2026 admissions include Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Michigan, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Vanderbilt, and Yale.