Patrick Bock
SAT & ACT Specialist
MA in Education & Pedagogy, The George Washington University
Perfect SAT Scores
1,000+ private students
Author of proprietary SAT & ACT Manuals
I have been living and breathing standardized tests for over twenty six years.
I know how to distinguish a content problem from a strategy problem from an execution problem.
I started as a tutor for The Princeton Review while still in college. I worked my way up the ladder 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, I realized I wanted a curriculum that could adapt to the needs of individual students and relied less on students adapting to the curriculum.
So I quit.
I spent years developing my own curriculum, got my Master’s in Education, and started Specifix Prep. I have been helping students on my own ever since.
My 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.
Test makers understand student psychology. I help students understand the test’s psychology. I provide a framework for remembering strategies, recognizing patterns, and understanding 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 do that, by the way. Changing the way you think about the test and mastering the techniques will require patience and self reflection. I help students recognize patterns in their own processes that lead to mistakes that seem otherwise unfixable.
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 a 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.