Chose: UT Austin
Isabella joined at the end of August, in the first days of her senior year, with three weeks until the September ACT.
She had a 30 and had been sitting on it. She wanted top engineering programs, where a 30 doesn’t do much for you.
Three weeks is short even by our standards. It’s short enough that the plan has to be right the first time, because there’s no room to discover in week two that week one went at the wrong thing.
Why we didn’t review any content
At a 30, the content is almost always already there.
A student scoring 30 knows the grammar rules, can do the algebra, and can read the passages. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be at a 30. So a generic prep course—which opens with content review because that’s what a course has to do for a room full of mixed abilities—spends the majority of its time on material the 30-scorer has known for years.
For Isabella that would have consumed all three weeks and moved nothing.
What actually separates a 30 from a 34 is a narrow set of things: the handful of genuinely complicated question types, and timing under pressure on the back half of each section. Those were the two problems Isabella described, and those were the only two things we worked on.
What three weeks looked like
Isabella worked over two hours a day.
She could, because there was no cap on it. She wasn’t buying a set number of sessions and rationing them—she had a plan, and support available for as much of it as she had time for. When a student has three weeks and real motivation, the last thing that should limit them is a package size.
Every day she knew her next best step. In a three-week sprint that matters more than in a 10-week one, because a single day spent guessing is 5% of the entire runway.
The result
Isabella scored a 34.
Four points in three weeks, from a starting point where most programs would have told her there wasn’t time to do anything meaningful.
She was accepted into UT Austin’s chemical engineering program.
What Isabella’s story shows
Two things, and they pull in the same direction.
The first is that a plateau at 30 is rarely a ceiling. It’s usually a sign that whatever the student has been doing was designed for a lower score and has stopped having anything to teach them.
The second is that senior year isn’t over in August. Isabella had three weeks, one test date, and an outcome that changed which engineering programs would read her seriously.
If your student is already good and has stopped improving, the fix is almost never more of the same work. It’s a much smaller amount of very different work.
What we did differently
- Skipped content review entirely—at a 30 the content is already there and reviewing it would have burned the three weeks we had.
- Went straight at timing, which was the specific thing costing her points on the harder questions.
- Targeted the small set of complicated question types that separate a 30 from a 34.
- Removed every cap on support so she could work as hard as the three weeks allowed—she put in over two hours a day.
Coached by
Boosted Brains coaching team
Every Boosted Brains coach has a perfect or near-perfect ACT score and has been personally trained by Carson Weekley (perfect 36) and Martin (Head of Student Success).