Test Prep Online

A Unique ACT and SAT Test Prep Program

Not happy with your ACT or SAT score? Let's face it. No amount of test prep course or strategy sessions will be enough, if you:

• Read slowly or inaccurately,
  
  
• Have weak reading comprehension skills,
  
  
• Find it hard to complete exams in the time allotted, or
  
  
• Struggle with multi-choice questions.

What you really need is a reading or learning makeover, that improves these fundamental skills. The question of course is this:

Isn't it too late to materially change these skills?

We can say with confidence, the answer here is no. If challenged appropriately the brain will integrate new skills in as little as two months. Improved underlying cognitive skills that will lead directly to higher scores.

Our Test Prep Skills Program is a reading or learning makeover -- an intensive, fast-acting jolt that isolates and exercises a number of critical reading and test taking skills such as processing speed, memory, decoding speed.

How It Works

After an assessment, Gemm develops an individualized protocol that works through a wide range of cognitive and reading skills, quickly isolating weaknesses that can be improved. Students work at home 30 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week with a dedicated Gemm program manager tracking progress through automatic Internet uploads.  The manager is constantly in touch, moving the student through the program and answering questions.  We also send weekly progress reports.

How Gemm Boosts Scores

Our test prep program is adapted from software we use for remedial reading and learning. For younger ones the programs build a cognitive foundation that enables children to learn to read and process information at a more normal rate.

For teenagers though our program has a more night and day effect. It helps automate aspects of reading and learning that are already learned but slow the student down because they require concentration. By making these skills -- decoding, sequencing, processing -- automatic, reading comprehension is much improved as is test taking efficiency.

Our program is based on Fast ForWord software with these specific test skill targets:

• Reading speed and comprehension. Fast and accurate decoding, and the ability to understand and draw inferences from the text are required competencies. 
  
  
• Processing efficiency. We can build processing speed and improve retention with working memory exercises that help avoid time-consuming re-reading, and improve multi-choice efficiency.
  
  
• Test taking stamina. We have exercises to strengthen focus and reduce careless errors, by improving working memory, so critical in multiple choice and in reading long passages.
  
  
• Vocabulary and language.   We build sophistication in vocabulary and metalinguistics -- dexterity with language -- for the upcoming college test and beyond.
  
  
• If the essay portion is challenging, we have exercises that build the critical thinking and abstract reasoning skills that directly impact essay writing.

While test prep is more incremental, our program works at a fundamental level to produce real change. You never know what is possible -- and we are often surprised ourselves -- when underlying talents and skills are unlocked and a student is making the most of his or her natural smarts.
Comparison of Gemm to Traditional Test Prep