SSAT tutoring for boarding and independent school admissions.

What does the SSAT test?

The Secondary School Admission Test is accepted by nearly every independent school and is the test most boarding schools prefer. It comes in three levels.

• Verbal is synonyms and analogies. Analogies are the part of the SSAT no school teaches, and most students have never seen one. A method matters as much as vocabulary here, and the vocabulary is advanced.
• Quantitative reaches above grade level, with no calculator. A seventh grader on the Upper Level sees algebra and geometry from courses they have not taken.
• Reading mixes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction passages with inference questions under time pressure.
• The writing sample is unscored but goes to schools. Admissions readers treat it as a look at unpolished writing, which is why it deserves practice.
• There is a guessing penalty. On the Middle and Upper Levels each wrong answer costs a quarter point and a blank costs nothing. Knowing when to guess and when to skip is a skill, and it is worth points.

Scores are reported as scaled scores by section and as percentiles compared with students of the same grade and gender who tested over the past three years. As with the ISEE, no school publishes a cutoff, and the most selective schools look at the whole file.

Should my child take the SSAT or the ISEE?

Most NYC day schools accept either, and in the city the ISEE is more commonly preferred. Boarding schools such as Deerfield, Groton, Andover, and Exeter accept both but historically lean SSAT. Beyond school preference, the tests differ in ways that matter for individual students.

If the school list allows either test, we recommend a short diagnostic of each. Some students take to analogies immediately and struggle with quantitative comparisons. Others are the reverse. Let the diagnostics decide. Our ISEE tutoring page covers the other side of the decision.

How we prepare students for the SSAT

1. A timed diagnostic. Full length, with the guessing penalty applied. School grades and annual in-school assessments do not predict SSAT performance, and the diagnostic shows where the reasoning gaps and the content gaps are.
2. A method for analogies. Students learn to build a precise sentence that captures the relationship in the stem pair and test each answer against it. With the method in place, vocabulary study becomes far more efficient.
3. Vocabulary that starts early. Our free vocabulary lists by level and vocabulary workbooks are built for the months before formal prep begins. This is the slow part, and there is no shortcut.
4. Math ahead of schedule. The algebra, geometry, and data topics the SSAT expects before school has taught them, delivered at a pace a middle schooler can retain.
5. Guessing strategy. When a student can eliminate one or more choices, guessing is mathematically right. When they can’t, skipping is. We drill this until it is automatic, because leaving it to instinct on test day costs points.
6. Writing sample practice. Students practice organizing a response quickly and writing cleanly under time, since schools read the sample as-is.
7. Test-date planning. The SSAT is offered on several standard Saturday dates each year, with Flex dates available through approved consultants and schools. Most boarding school deadlines land in mid-January, with interviews through the fall, so a fall test with a second sitting in reserve is the usual plan. We help families choose dates and decide whether a retake is worth it.
8. Homework families can see. Assignments on a calendar and a written recap after every session in the KFT portal.

Families we tutor for the SSAT

• NYC families applying to boarding schools, in person across Manhattan and Brooklyn.
• Families outside New York, including international families applying to US boarding schools, over video. Much of our SSAT work already runs that way.
• Students applying to NYC day schools that prefer the SSAT, or whose diagnostics show the SSAT is the better fit.
• 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 families with the accommodations request.

Recent KFT admissions include Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Academy Andover, Phillips Exeter, and Friends Academy, alongside Horace Mann, Spence, Trinity, Riverdale, Dalton, and Collegiate in the city. Full lists by year are on our results page.