Nathaniel H.: 25 to 35 on the ACT in 10 Weeks—Accepted to Northwestern

Nathaniel came to us at a 25 with a history of tutoring that hadn’t done much.

He’s neurodivergent, and the standard tutoring format—be in this room, at this hour, for this many minutes, while someone explains something at you—was working against him rather than for him. Not because he couldn’t do the material. He processes information in his own order and at his own pace, and an hour-long session with a tutor across the table doesn’t leave room for either.

So the diagnosis wasn’t really about the ACT. It was that nobody had matched the delivery to the student.

What we changed first

We took the meetings away.

Nathaniel’s coaching ran almost entirely asynchronously. He got a written plan laid out in advance, worked through it on whatever schedule suited him that week, and had a coach reachable around the clock when something didn’t land. A question at 11pm got an answer at 11pm instead of waiting for a Tuesday slot.

For a lot of students the weekly Zoom is the spine of the program. For Nathaniel it was the obstacle. Once it was gone, the work started moving.

That’s the part worth sitting with if you’ve got a kid who’s been through tutoring that didn’t stick. The usual conclusion parents reach is that their student needs to try harder or that the ACT just isn’t their thing. Sometimes the actual problem is that the format is wrong and the student is fine.

The work itself

About four to five hours a week for 10 weeks. That’s not a heroic time commitment—it’s less than most students put into a single sport.

What made it enough was that the plan covered content and strategy at the same time rather than sequencing them. Nathaniel wasn’t doing weeks of review before being allowed near a strategy lesson. Every piece of content he shored up came attached to the question types it showed up in and the approach for handling them under time pressure.

He worked through it on his own, at his own hours, with someone available whenever he hit something he couldn’t resolve.

The result

Nathaniel scored a 35.

Ten points. It’s one of the largest single improvements we’ve recorded, and it came out of one of the smallest weekly time commitments.

He was accepted to Northwestern’s computer science program.

What Nathaniel’s story shows

There’s a version of this story where Nathaniel keeps cycling through tutors, each one a bit better than the last, and finishes high school convinced he’s bad at standardized tests. He had already started down that road when we met him.

The 10 points didn’t come from a secret. They came from taking a student who does his best thinking alone and on his own clock, and building the program around that instead of asking him to adapt to a format that had already failed him twice.

If your student has been through tutoring that went nowhere, it’s worth asking whether the content was wrong or whether the delivery was.