Patrick Bock
Founder and Lead Instructor
Patrick has been living and breathing standardized tests for just over twenty years.
He started as a tutor for a larger test prep company while still in college. He worked his way up the ladder at that company to become one of the most highly requested tutors in the state and full-time director of the company’s tutoring department.
After ten years, he realized his employer’s curriculum made too many counterproductive assumptions and wasn’t conducive to customization, so he quit, got his Master’s in Education, and started Specifix Prep. He has been helping students on his own ever since.
Our Philosophy
Content mastery is the foundation.
Many test preparation programs assume you don’t know or can’t learn the foundational knowledge needed for standardized tests and instead focus on tricks and strategies for getting around those supposed deficiencies. We believe the opposite: content mastery is essential, and learning only tricks and strategies is like building a house on sand.
Know the test maker, and know yourself.
You need to understanding the psychology of standardized tests to provide a framework for remembering strategies and knowing how your intuition can induce mistakes.
Improvement takes time.
You can’t bake a cake at 700 degrees to half the cooking time. Please don’t that, by the way. Changing the way you think about the test and mastering the techniques will require patience and self reflection.
Practice. Practice. Practice.
By the time you take the test, most of what you learn will be automatic — you’ll actually have to think to do it incorrectly.
It’s OK to be boring.
Making up a creative strategy to solve each question is time-consuming and exhausting. You’ll learn that almost every question is just a version of a question you’ve already seen, and there are finite number of reliable solutions that you’ll use again and again.
Good students should have good test scores.
Our program works best on students who get good grades but don’t see that same level of success on standardized tests. If you’re not afraid of hard work, we’ll help you get a score that reflects your abilities.