Score Increase Guarantee

Helping parents and students reduce the rising cost of college via higher SAT scores, good school selection, and sound planning.

Registered Students ~ Click Here for Access to Our SAT Prep Forum

~ Our Score Increase Guarantee:

~ The Typical Competitor’s Guarantee

~ What To Do After The First Course Experience

~ An Explanation of Variations in the Standard Deviation of SAT Score Improvements After a Single Course Experience

~ Refund Request Proceedure (This will not happen to you.... We just put it here in case we ever need it).

~ The Importance of Your Feedback

Carolina College Prep’s SAT Prep course has a genuine Score Increase Guarantee. As a student in the SAT Preparation course, I’m positive that your student will improve his SAT score, and I’ll refund your money if his score does not improve after attending our course.

This is Carolina College Prep’s Score Improvement Guarantee:

As a student of Carolina College Prep’s SAT Prep Course, I understand that if neither my math score nor my critical reading score improves from my baseline SAT score after my second time through the course (and my second attempt on the SAT), Carolina College Prep will gladly refund my full course tuition. I also understand that I may retake the SAT Prep course as often as I deem necessary to achieve my SAT goals without having to pay additional money (and I am encouraged to do so).

With my guarantee, your student’s score will improve, or I’ll refund your money. This is a true risk free proposition as far as you are concerned. While a 10 point bump in either the Math or Critical Reading section qualifies for the score improvement, I’d be horrified if this happened to your child, and I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that our typical student increases his SAT score between 100-190 points on average after coming through our course as prescribed. The most commonly reported improvements we hear of seem to fall within the 130-150 point range.

Please see SAT Course Covenant for complete terms and details of the Score Increase Guarantee.

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The Competitors’ Claims:

While many of my competitors offer something they like to call a “guarantee,” I am not aware of a single competitor that has a better guarantee than I offer, and the best way to prove my assertion is to look at other companies that claim to “do more.”

Consider One of Our Competitor’s Score Increase Guarantee: This is an example from a company that claims to offer a 250 point score increase guarantee on the SAT. Their guarantee reads, “If your official SAT Test Results fail to improve by at least 250 points, we will give you 12 months to take our class again for free!”

At first blush, this seems like a pretty good guarantee (and the 250 point score improvement really jumps out at you), but you should note that there is NEVER a point in this “guarantee” in which you would receive a cash refund of your registration fee if your student’s score failed to improve by the advertised 250 points. For that matter, even if your student’s score dropped 300 points after taking their class, your only course of action is to retake class within the 12 month time frame [provided you attended all 36 hours of class sessions the first go round, completed all of their homework assignments (which are so lengthy to be absurd, even bordering on the ridiculous), and took all four of their “3-hour, at home practice SAT tests]. If you didn’t do all those things the first time, it appears that you would not be able to take the class again.

Of course, the broader point here is that this competitor’s average score improvement per student is NOWHERE NEAR their 250 point guaranteed and advertised number. They don’t tell you any information about the score improvement their typical student obtains on the SAT after taking their class, and their Testimonial Section of their website is chock full of “testimonials” from students who are “leaving” the course (and have not actually even taken the SAT or seen how much they improved).

Read all of our Testimonial pages, and you’ll see a marked contrast to our competitors students’ testimonials. Most of our testimonials are specific, and they were all written after the student received his results. Regardless of the whole testimonial thing, I hope you can see that if anything, the typical guarantee offered by the competition is more of a “marketing tool” to entice naïve consumers to “bite” than it is a legitimate guarantee of performance on their part.

We are different, because if we do not perform as advertised, you will not be held financially liable. Of course, we could offer a similar ‘guarantee’ to this example and theoretically come out ahead financially, because just like this competitor, we would NEVER be held accountable for failing to help a student improve his SAT score. That said, nothing will kill a business faster than a dissatisfied client, and we know the end result of companies that don’t deliver the goods they promised.

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What To Do After The First Time Through The Course:

Please call us with the results (good bad or indifferent). We need to know the results of the first test to best design the custom portion of the curriculum going forward for your child. Regardless of your student’s score improvement the first time through our course (even if he went up 200 points, or more, which has happened many times), I will recommend that he do the following:

Reset his goals higher (for example: If an 1100 was the initial target, and was obtained, a 1200 should be the new target).
Retake the SAT Course to gain further mastery of the material.
Retake the SAT again to build upon his success (“Raising the Bar” increases scholarship money).

Why retake the course? First and foremost, some of the techniques we teach take significant amounts of time to develop, and require more practice opportunities than a 10 or 12 hour course can provide. This being the case, multiple course “experiences” consistently result in the highest SAT score improvements.

Most importantly, under our Unlimited, FREE Course Retake Provision, the ability to retake our course over and over again (as many times as it takes to get the score your student needs) is provided free of charge!

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An Explanation of Variations in the Standard Deviation of SAT Score Improvements After a Single Course Experience:

In case you are curious, roughly 90% of all the students in our course will improve their score the first time through the course (some a lot, some a little). For reasons discussed later, some students will not improve their scores the first time through the course, and some students may even see a decrease in their scores after taking our course the first time.

Initially, seeing some students see their SAT score drop after taking the course the first time (only to see it jump up after the 2nd time through the course) was quite disturbing to me. After years of research into this phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the primary reason a few students “flat line” or lose points the first time through the course, is because they have not quite mastered our unique approach. As a result, they miss difficult questions (due to careless errors) that they would have previously been unable to even attempt.

Missing problems has a negative impact on scores because College Board (the SAT designer) penalizes the student for missing problems, so “omitting” a question due to ignorance is better than “missing” that same problem due to a careless error. The result of such carelessness on previously unworkable problems is a score that is lower by comparison to the baseline score.

That said - just as in sports - “practice makes perfect.” The second time through the course, all of our students have had the practice they need, and see the improvement we initially expected (typically in the 100 - 190 point score improvement range). I share that with you to encourage you to stay the course should a lower than expected outcome happen to your student.

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Refund Request Procedure:

Pertaining to the worst case scenario (happening only 9 times, and less than 1% of all students enrolled in the course since 1997): If after the second time through the course and the second attempt on the SAT, if your student’s SAT score still has not increased from his “baseline” score (the score he had before enrolling in our course), we will offer you a cash refund of your enrollment fee.

That said, we hate losing, and we would be determined to double our efforts on your student’s behalf, and continue to work with him to achieve his desired score improvement if he were willing to continue the fight with us. Not everyone wants to fight on though, so the refund is granted to those students.

For the purposes of measuring the score improvement, we measure off of your “baseline” SAT score (the SAT score you had before you enrolled in the course).
The SAT must be taken within 14 days of the last class session.
Refund requests must be submitted in writing within 45 days of the SAT test date.
The original score report you received through the mail showing your SAT score must be included with your request for scoring verification purposes. In addition, all course materials must be returned including: Syllabus, Handouts, etc.

Once a refund is requested, the student forfeits all said benefits listed within the Unlimited FREE Course Retake Policy, and any further SAT Prep assistance from Carolina College Prep.

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The Importance of Receiving Your Feedback:

Please make sure you report your results back to us when you get them. We keep track of our typical score improvement per student to make sure that we are helping students - as advertised.

Score reporting is also important to us because College Board is constantly trying to make courses like Carolina College Prep’s SAT course ineffective (by tweaking things just enough to confuse students that have been to a prep course). For this reason, we seek feedback from students to make sure we are “on target.” This is also why I take at least 4 SATs per year as well!

Carolina College Prep has a great history of long term, sustained success. Since 1997, well over 1,000 students have taken my SAT preparation course, and only 9 of these students failed to see a score increase (and we refunded their money).

Since the adoption of the New SAT in 2005 (which includes the Writing Section), our average score improvement per student has consistently landed in the 100 - 190 point range. It is important to note that the 100 - 190 point score improvement averages include improvements in only the Math and Critical Reading sections of the New SAT. We do not include Writing Section improvements in calculating our average score improvements.

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Score Increase Guarantee