What to Look for in an ACT/SAT Tutor

There’s no shortage of ACT and SAT tutors to choose from. What’s harder to find is an easy way to tell the good ones apart from the mediocre ones before you’ve already paid for a semester of sessions. Most tutoring looks the same from the outside: a friendly person, a stack of practice tests, a promise of improvement. The differences that actually matter are underneath that, and they’re worth asking about directly before you sign up.

Here’s what I’d tell a friend to ask.

What did the tutor actually score?

This is the most direct question you can ask, and most families never ask it. If a tutor is teaching the ACT or SAT, they should be scoring at or near the top of the scale themselves, a 35+ on the ACT or the equivalent on the SAT. Not because a high score alone makes someone a good teacher, but because you can’t reliably teach a student to close the gap between a 32 and a 36 if you’ve never had to understand that gap yourself. The last few points on either test come from precision, not general knowledge, and a tutor needs to have operated at that level of precision to teach it.

Ask directly. A tutor who’s confident in their own testing background will tell you without hesitation.

Are they teaching from real test questions?

There’s a real difference between a tutor who works from official, retired ACT and SAT questions and one who works from a generic worksheet that’s meant to feel like the test. The real test has patterns: specific wrong-answer types, specific ways questions get phrased, specific traps built into the design. Those patterns only show up reliably in real questions. A tutor working from knockoff material, no matter how well-intentioned, is teaching your student to recognize a different test than the one they’ll actually sit for.

Ask what materials they use. Official ACT and College Board questions is the answer you want to hear.

How much turnover does the company have?

This matters more than most families realize, especially with larger tutoring companies. A lot of test prep tutoring is staffed by college students, often smart, well-meaning ones, who are teaching the test part-time for a semester or two before moving on to something else. That’s not automatically bad, but it’s usually thin. Deep knowledge of a test, the kind that lets a tutor explain why a specific wrong answer is designed to be tempting, comes from years of sitting inside the material, not from having scored well on it once as a student.

Ask how long the tutor has been teaching this specific test, and whether that’s their primary focus or something they do on the side.

Is the plan actually built around your student?

Every tutoring company will tell you their approach is individualized. Very few actually mean it. Individualized should mean a plan built from your student’s specific error patterns, not a fixed curriculum that gets delivered the same way to every student who walks in. A student who’s losing points to careless errors on Math needs something different from a student who’s losing points to pacing on Reading, even if their overall scores are identical. If a tutor can’t explain how the plan changes based on what your student is actually missing, it isn’t really individualized. It’s a script with your student’s name on it.

What strategies are actually being taught?

This is the question that tells you the most, and it’s worth asking in the first conversation. If the answer is mostly about content, reviewing grammar rules, redoing math concepts, going over vocabulary, that’s a content-review approach. It’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. The bigger source of missed points for most students isn’t missing knowledge. It’s decision-making under time pressure: which questions to fight and which to leave, how to catch a wrong answer type before choosing it, how to avoid the careless error a poorly-read graph or figure is designed to cause, what to actually do on a math problem when you don’t immediately see how to start it, instead of staring at it and hoping something comes to you. If a tutor can describe specific strategies like this without hesitation, that’s a tutor teaching the test itself, not just its content.

None of this means the tutor down the street or the well-known franchise is automatically wrong for your student. But these are the questions that separate a real evaluation from a guess, and they’re worth asking before you commit, not after a semester of sessions that didn’t move the score. If you want to see how we answer these questions ourselves, book a free diagnostic and ask us anything on this list.