Gagan: 33 to 35 on the ACT in 4 Weeks—Into a BS/MD Program

Gagan came to us with a 33.

That’s a score most students would take without hesitation, and for most applications it’s more than sufficient. Gagan was applying to BS/MD programs—combined undergraduate and medical school tracks that admit somewhere around 4% of applicants. At that end of the pool, a 33 is unremarkable.

He’d been working with a tutor and had plateaued.

Why the tutor stopped working

This isn’t a story about a bad tutor. It’s a story about the ceiling on a particular kind of help.

Most tutoring is built to fix things a student gets wrong because they don’t know them. That’s the right model for the large majority of students, and it works well from a 20 up into the low 30s.

A 33 has essentially run out of things they don’t know. Gagan wasn’t missing content. He was missing an approach for the small number of genuinely hard questions at the top of each section—the ones that are designed to be time sinks, or to look like a familiar question type until you’re three steps in.

There’s no amount of additional content review that addresses that. It’s a different skill, and it’s the one that separates a 33 from a 35.

Four weeks

The work was narrow enough that four weeks at four to five hours a week was sufficient. Around 18 hours total.

All of it went to higher-level strategy on the hardest question types. Nothing went to review, because there was nothing worth reviewing.

It ran asynchronously with a coach reachable at any hour. At this level a student mostly needs an answer to one specific question at the moment they hit it, not a weekly session that recaps a week they already understood. Removing the scheduling meant nearly all 18 hours went to actual work.

The result

Gagan scored a 35.

He was accepted to Rowan’s BS/MD program.

Two points

Two points is the smallest improvement on this page, and it’s here deliberately.

A student at a 33 asking whether coaching is worth it is asking a fair question, and the honest answer is that the gain will be small. Nobody goes from 33 to 36 in a month. What we’d argue is that at the top of the scale, small gains are the only gains available, and they’re often the ones carrying the most weight—because the programs that care about the difference between a 33 and a 35 are the programs where the acceptance rate is 4%.

What Gagan’s story shows

The objection we hear from families in this position is my student already has a good score. That’s true. Gagan did.

The question worth asking instead is whether the score is good enough for the specific thing they’re applying to. For a lot of applications a 33 comfortably is. For a combined medical program admitting four applicants in a hundred, it wasn’t, and 18 hours of the right kind of work closed the gap.