The short answer
Kaplan's content is rarely the problem. A book covers every topic on the ACT equally, which means your student spends most of their study time on material they've already mastered. What moves a score is knowing which three to five question types are actually costing points, and a book can't tell you that about your specific kid. Sarah ground through a massive prep book on her own and stayed at 25. She scored a 33 on her first test inside the program.
The instinct to buy the book first is a good one. It’s cheap, it’s comprehensive, and if the problem were missing knowledge it would work.
For most students stuck in the 22 to 28 range, the problem isn’t missing knowledge.
What a book can’t do
A prep book is organized by topic, because that’s the only way to organize a book. Every chapter gets roughly equal weight. Comma rules get a chapter, trigonometry gets a chapter, and the book has no way to know that your student already handles commas fine and loses four points a test to careless arithmetic under time pressure.
So the student works through it front to back, spends most of their hours on material they’ve already got, and arrives at test day having practiced their strengths.
That’s the pattern we see over and over. It isn’t a discipline failure. It’s a targeting failure, and it’s what happens when the study plan can’t respond to the student.
What Sarah’s case actually showed
Sarah was top of her class and had convinced herself she could study her way to a good score alone. She’d been grinding through a large prep book and sitting at a 25.
The first thing her coach Neha did was take the book away.
What replaced it was a daily plan with a very short list of priorities, rebuilt as her diagnostics changed, plus a daily check-in. She scored a 33 on her first test inside the program and a 34 on the next one.
Nothing about that was more work than she’d been doing. It was the same student, roughly the same hours, pointed at a much smaller set of things.
How to tell which problem you have
If your student has worked through most of a prep book and their score has moved less than two points, more content is unlikely to be the answer. The useful next step is a diagnostic that names the specific question types costing them points, and then a plan built around only those.
That’s the first thing we do on a call, and you’ll get the read on it whether or not you work with us.
This question comes up most often when families are comparing us with Kaplan. See the full side-by-side →
