Episode 18 – ACT Prep That Actually Works: Faster Score Gains | Carson Weekley, Head ACT Coach at Boosted Brains

In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe Sebestyen sits down with Carson Weekley, Head ACT Coach at Boosted Brains, to uncover the truth about ACT preparation and why most conventional approaches fall short. Carson reveals how students can significantly improve their scores in just a matter of weeks by focusing on high-impact strategies rather than time-intensive study routines.

Carson shares a results-driven framework focused on precision, strategy, and efficiency rather than brute-force studying. The conversation highlights common mistakes students make, including over-practicing without feedback, misunderstanding test patterns, and failing to optimize timing. Carson also explains how targeted interventions, data analysis, and test-specific techniques can dramatically accelerate score improvement in a short timeframe.

This episode is essential for high school students, parents, and educators navigating the college admissions process. Listeners will gain actionable insights into maximizing ACT performance, avoiding costly prep mistakes, and implementing smarter, faster strategies to achieve competitive scores.

🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations on academic strategy, college prep, and the future of student success.

📲 Connect with Carson: boostedbrains36.com, @boostedbrains36
📲 Learn more about us: supportedtutoring.com, @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe Sebestyen. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. All right, good evening. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian. Today I am interviewing Carson Weekly. Next hour, I'll be walking you through the exact system he uses to add five plus points to students' ACT scores in just four to eight weeks and why most families are wasting thousands on test prep that actually doesn't work. So this is not theory, this is actually what gets results. So again, welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college prep without wasting thousands of dollars and years of time. The answer usually involves finding the people who have figured out the rules of the game that schools aren't telling you. And that's why I am thrilled to have Carson Weekly here today. Carson is the founder of Boosted Brains, a U Chicago economics graduate, and someone who has scored a perfect 36 on the ACT over a dozen times. But here's what makes him different. He built a system called the ACT hacking system that has helped thousands of students improve their scores by an average of five points, with some students unlocking $50,000 to $88,000 in scholarship money. We're going to dive into how the ACT actually works, why most test prep is function fundamentally broken, and what your family should be doing instead. Carson, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Thanks, Dr. Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Carson Weekly, as uh Dr. Joe introduced. Like he said, uh I'm the founder of Boosted Brains. And yeah, we help high school students get significantly better ACT scores. I personally struggled on the ACT the first time I took it myself. I wasted over a hundred hours studying the normal prep methods, you know, open up prep booklets and just wasting time until I found a more efficient way of doing things and then ultimately scored myself a perfect 36 that opened up doors to a lot of colleges that I wouldn't have otherwise had the chance to get into and ended up grabbing a University of Chicago degree. Uh, since since then, I've taken the ACT a bunch of times, scored a dozen perfect 36s. And yeah, now we've built out a really good system here at Boosted Brains. We've helped, like you said, uh thousands of families. Over 250 of our students have scored above a 30 on the ACT, collectively grabbing over 10 somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars of scholarships. And that's our our goal is to help students unlock unlocked schools, better scholarships, and ultimately give themselves the most options possible.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

That's all I that's an amazing story. Um, you know, everyone sees the perfect 36 and the results um your students are getting, but I kind of want to deconstruct the engine behind that. And so um let's start with like actually what actually got you here. So um, you know, you said you scored a perfect 36 uh multiple times uh on the ACT, but you also say you aren't you weren't able to do this. Walk us through what changed.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

So the first time I walked in and I took the ACT, I was I was a good high school student, and I was just expecting that because I did well in high school, I was just gonna naturally do well on the ACT. But as pretty much everyone who's taken any of these standardized tests has seen, high school doesn't really prepare you at all for standardized tests. You know, I say now that the ACT has two separate parts to it. It has content on the one hand and it has strategy on the other hand. High school will teach you a lot of the content, not necessarily all of the content, but it'll teach you a lot of the content here on this hand. But there's just a strategy for taking the ACT uh that is not ever taught in high school. And that's what I realized the first time I walked in and you know, I ran out of time on the math section. I didn't have any idea how to approach the reading section of the test and had to pretty much go back to the drawing board. So I did what you know most people do. Most uh my my high school counselor told me to just pick up one of those big red ACT prep booklets that's like that thick, you know, 500 pages, and just start ripping through a bunch of the practice tests. That didn't help me at all, actually. I just wasted a bunch of time doing that and was still at a 31, um, even after you know spending all that time doing it. And it wasn't really until I actually looked at all of those practice tests that I took and realized that there were a lot of patterns in the types of questions that showed up and realized that I really needed to come up with that strategy that I talked about for approaching some of those types of questions. Like if you can figure out that there's really only 30 different questions that show up kind of again and again and again on the English section of the test, if you can just have a process for attacking each one of those 30 types of questions so that when you see it show up the next time, it's just kind of an automatic, like, oh, I know that this is a subject verb agreement question. Therefore, I'm going to look for does the subject match the verb? And then I'm going to, you know, answer accordingly. And if you just have a process like that for each and every question, you you build that into your muscle memory, then you know the test is going to be something that comes a lot more naturally.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

So what makes your approach to ACT prep uh fundamentally different than Kaplan, then Princeton Review, or like a $200 an hour private tutor who would just teach it?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Well, yeah. So I I think you may have to take take it a little bit um kind of case by case for each one of those um, I guess, other alternatives. But really what we do is we analyze where a student is in terms of their current strengths and their weaknesses. Like I said, if there are 30 different types of questions on the English section, a student may already know how to do 18 of them. So we're not going to spend a whole bunch of time working on those first 18 types of questions. We're going to work on the last 12 that they really need in order to um finally get all of the questions correct on the English section. And so we are very targeted and very um very personalized with each student who comes into our program. And so, you know, every single student that comes in, we give them a full diagnostic test and then we give them a full strengths and weaknesses analysis. So it's not that we're just saying, hey, here's here's our uh Carson Weekly's class, and you're gonna come in with 30 other students and just you know, we're gonna teach you everything you need to know on the ACT because everyone needs to know something different and for their time to be spent most efficiently. And so that's probably how we differ from a some of the bigger name, um, more group style classes. And in terms of tutoring, I actually have like uh an interesting take on tutoring. I started out as a tutor myself, and you know, I was working with kids, charging them, charging them the hour, charging their parents by the hour. And funny enough, when early on, what one of my students was going through through through the process, and he wasn't necessarily doing all of the work outside of our tutoring sessions that that I would have expected or or would have wanted from a student who was going to make significant improvement on the test. And so I wasn't really expecting a great result but the first time he took the test, even though we'd been working together for a few months. And we were, you know, I guess he got his results back and he had improved, I think, like one or two points from his from his starting score, which as you pointed out, you know, we're shooting for four, five, six, or or even more, you know, extra points on the ACT. So one or two points is not a significant improvement in my book. And so I actually I set up a call with with his mom to kind of talk about the results. And I was expecting, you know, a lot of disappointment and a lot of negativity. And what actually ended up happening was the the mom said, Hey, this is this is you know okay. It's pretty good progress. I'm I'm glad that we're moving in the right direction. Now, let's go from meeting for two hours every week to we were just meeting, you know, twice a week for one hour at a time. So two hours per week. Let's go from meeting twice a week to meeting four times per week and let's bump it up to two hours every session. So I went from making or I guess working with this kid for two hours a week to working with a kid for eight hours a week. So I four X'd the number of hours and and billing cycles that I was able to have from this student, even though he didn't improve as much as I would have wanted him to. And if we had gotten a great score the first time around, then I would have not been able to make any more money from that family. And that's just the reality of the business, and that's the reality of how hourly tutoring is structured. So now, you know, we actually after after having that experience, we we now have a different pricing structure where we align our incentives with the family's incentives. So the student wants to get the ACT done as quickly as possible, we want the same thing. So we we really provide unlimited support, unlimited access, unlimited coaching um for the duration of the program that that students are in for us with. And you know, that aligns our incentives with the family's incentives because it's like if we if we can get things done in six weeks, that gets a student a great result. We're happy with that. It gets them off of our plate as well. And and the student is really happy with that because they don't have to take the ACT any more times. So that's kind of how we long-winded answer there, but yeah, that's how we differentiate ourselves in terms of the the model itself.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

I that coaching versus tutoring distinction is something we talk about a lot. Actually, I talk about it constantly because I do believe the hourly tutoring model is fundamentally broken. It is actually financially incentivized to keep students dependent, right? Like, and honestly, you're you're you want to make more money, the value of the sessions, but you're basically saying the same thing from the AC side is that you're more more or less guaranteeing an outcome over sessions, right? Like, if I can get the results in a shorter amount of time, why don't we just do that?

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Right, exactly. Uh if you're trying to renovate your house and your general contractor comes and says, Hey, we're gonna charge you by by the hour or by the week that we're doing this, and you're gonna pay us a thousand dollars a week, and we don't really know how long it's gonna take, then you're probably gonna go to a different general contractor.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Right, right, right, right. I I mean it's it's hard because I think we're so wired to just thinking in terms of hourly tutoring because it's it's so ingrained, but it's just it is it is kind of antiquated in that way. So you obviously figured out the system. Let's kind of break it down for the parents listening. You call the ACT hacking system. If a student came to you today, you call it the ACT hacking system. If you if a student came to you today uh with a 24 and said, I want a 30 or higher than a 30, what's the first thing you diagnose and like where do you start?

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah, so the very very first thing that we do is like I mentioned, we we're gonna give you a diagnostic test. So in order to really create a a roadmap for us to go from 24 to 30, we need to know where we are right now. Right? It's just like you know, if you're going on a road trip or even if you're just going down to the grocery store and you get in your car, we've all got the Apple CarPlay, and it pulls up the map. It needs to find your location of where you are right now before it can give you a map to get to where you're gonna go as efficiently as possible. And so that's the very first thing we're gonna do. And really that that's the first step of our process is just find the question types that are what we call lowest hanging fruit. So it's where where is our student missing a lot of questions? What types of questions are we missing most often? And also how often do those question types show up on the ACT? Because you you may have no chance of getting a uh an ellipse question correct on the math section. But if that question only shows up once on the entire test, that might not be a high priority question. So that's the very first thing we do is diagnose all the strengths and weaknesses and then lay those out in terms of highest priority onto lowest priority.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

And I guess break that down. You said like there's the ATT has thousands of questions, but only like 15, 20 question types per section. So that changes everything about how students should prepare a breakdown. What does it actually mean or look like in practice?

SPEAKER_00 13:26

For example, I like like I said on the English section, there may be only you know 30 or so types of questions. And so when we get a student's diagnostic test, we can figure out hey, is it these you know, subject verb agreement questions that the we only got 30% of these correct and they show up all the time? And so that would be a high priority question. That's that's gonna be rank pretty highly. And then what we do is, you know, from there, if a student misses a lot of those questions, we're gonna work specifically on practice drills on subject verb agreement, and we're gonna work on both what that question type looks like, like how do we know that it's a subject verb agreement question? And then as soon as we recognize that it's a subject-verb agreement question, what do we need to do in order to solve it correctly? What are the grammar rules or what are the strategies or the tips and tricks that we can use to eliminate answer choices or whatever it may be to most efficiently solve that question? And then since we're working specifically on subject-verb agreement questions, we're not necessarily working on everything on the English section all at the same time. At times we will do that, but when we're really trying to build muscle memory on subject verb agreement questions, we're gonna work just specifically on building the muscle memory there by just repetitive practice of how do we recognize this question? How do we solve it when it looks a little bit different? What are the different variations of this type of question? And until it really just becomes second nature. And after a day or two, a couple hours of practicing, a student can just recognize they they go in, they see a new variation of subject verb agreement, and they know exactly what they need to do, and it's automatic. They don't even really have to think twice about it. It's just like how you know a lot of our students are are student athletes. And for every single student athlete, you you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're if you're a basketball player, you've practiced your free throw shot a million times before. And by the time you get to a game, you're not really thinking about the angle of your wrist or how hard we need to, and forgive me for a terrible basketball shot because I'm not a basketball shot.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

You're good. It's there's so many parallels to what we do with the AP program in terms of that pattern recognition and practicing the skills. Um, it's so much more than just content, right? Um, and so there there are ways, it sounds like to hack the exam through some repetitive practice of knowing exactly what your weaknesses are and building up those skills. And so, you know, reading a lot of probably I'm trying to work with a lot of similar students that we do, high GPA students. Um, some of them tank different sections. Um, and so if we're talking about students with a 4.0 GPA scoring 22s on the ACT, why does this happen and how do you fix that?

SPEAKER_00 16:17

That's a great question. And and we do see it all the time. That's kind of our our main um student population that we work with. We see a lot of students who who come in with 30s and they're looking for 34s, uh, and and we we work with a lot of them, but our I say 60% of our students probably are students who come in for us, they're four three students, and they have between a 22 and a 24 on the ACT. And kind of it's a similar thing to what I was saying about myself back in the day when I realized that I just went into the ACT, assuming that because I was a good student in high school that I was going to do well on the standardized test. But it's because the ACT tests both content and strategy. And even if, you know, I'd say that high school doesn't really high school teaches you a lot of the content, but you know, when there's three years of it covered on the ACT, it's still probably not sufficient to just assume the everything content-wise from high school. But then there's this entire other picture or piece of the picture, which is the strategy, which is just not taught in high school. And so it's honestly like when you when you when we break it down like that, it makes a lot more sense. It's like, oh, we can do really, really well in high school, but those two things are just not super correlated. It would be like if you if you haven't specifically prepared for the ACT, it would be like showing up to your your pre-calc final without having taken pre-calc throughout the entire year. It it's a completely separate test that you have to prepare for, um, specifically, uh as if it were its own class, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Okay. And so that is again a parallel that we have. And the uh I guess with students getting those grades but still struggling on the AC kind of mirrors what we see with the APs here. It's not really about memorization, not about content, it's not even about grades, really. It's just kind of building those skills under pressure. But walking through your like sprint model where you do these in four to eight week intensives um instead of like six to twelve months of prep, like how are you getting those results in that short amount of time? And what does a typical week look like for a student you're working with?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, great question. And so we we actually started working in this sprint model, mostly because you know, we found that students don't want to study for the ACT for 12 months. Um, and this is uh maybe it comes down to my my sister runs track, and I I I ran track way back in the day. I actually I I played baseball more seriously, but no nobody likes long distance, really. We we there are the the people who run marathons and run 5K's and stuff like that, but you know, long distance kind of sucks, and so most most students are much better at finishing a sprint and can committing to going all out in a in a short sprint than they are for a marathon, um, especially when when it's a marathon with no real end in sight. So, what we do is we target a specific test date that's about six or eight weeks out in the future. Typically, six weeks is a really good sweet spot. And because we have that you know, six-week window of time that the student knows about, we know about as coaches, and the parents know about, we're able to really go all in and the student is able to you know sprint a lot faster, knowing that there's a finish line there that's only six weeks away. And so we're able to put in a lot of good, concentrated work over that period of time compared to a lot of the programs where it's, hey, we're gonna do once a week tutoring or twice a week tutoring for six months or 12 months. We are doing work every single day. Most of our students are doing somewhere around an hour per day of work. Of course, it does depend on you know the student's situation, yeah, and we're flexible to schedules and everything. But if we're able to put in about an hour per day of good, consistent work over six weeks, that's a huge amount of time to build really good muscle memory. And I'll always come back to the sports analogies because I I I've played baseball. But like if you're thinking about your baseball specifically, if you were to only practice your your swing or your throwing once a week or twice a week, right? You're you're not gonna build any muscle memory whatsoever. You're gonna take one or two steps forward during your lesson or during your practice, and then you're gonna take one or two steps backward during the week when you're not practicing and you're resting for those five or six other days of the week. And so that's why a lot of normal preparation over the course of 12 months doesn't work because it's too spread out. Whereas on the other hand, when we're working, a student comes into our program, they have a roadmap that shows them exactly what they're doing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and it's all building upon one another. Every day is building upon the last. And so Monday, we may make a little bit of progress, we take a step forward, and then Tuesday, we take a step forward building off of that progress from Monday. So it's not like we're, you know, going through this one step forward, one step backward, two steps forward, half a step backward. Um, we're just consistently making progress every single day. And again, it all kind of ties into our model of you know, we're providing unlimited support. So like our coaches are messaging with our students every single day. Sending videos, voice memos, they're meeting on Zoom, and they're making sure that any question that a student has is answered as quickly as possible. So it doesn't become a roadblock. So again, if a student has a question on a worksheet that they're working on Tuesday, they're not waiting until next Sunday when they're meeting with their tutor. They're getting a question answered Tuesday afternoon so that Wednesday they can work on a different problem rather than still being stuck on that whatever they they had that question on on Tuesday. A typical process looks like as we just roll right on through and continue making progress until test day.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focused on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. So that unlimited support, there's a blend of synchronous and asynchronous communication and check-ins. So like how does that work and how does that end up being more valuable than paying someone by the hour or just having an hourly tutoring session?

SPEAKER_00 23:19

So of course, you know, when you have an hourly tutoring session, the the tutor is incentivized, one, to have more of those hourly tutoring sessions. And even though those those tutoring sessions may not be the most useful, uh if you're just sitting there together um with a tutor and they're kind of spoon feeding you information, that tutor is just basically putting the answer on a silver platter for you, then you're not really building up the muscle memory to do it on your own. Yeah, the tutor's not going to be there when you're taking the ACT, unless you've got some unique situation worked out where uh where they're able to take the test for you. But um, yeah, if your tutor's not going to be there and in the testing center with you, then you should be practicing a lot and doing a significant amount of practice without your tutor there. And the other thing is if if you have access to message your tutor at any point in time, or you message really what we call them coaches, message one of our coaches at any point in time, then we're able to get an answer back to you right away. So we have students who they're working on an ACT worksheet during a free period at 11:30 in the morning, they have a question on something, or we can actually just go in and see that they may have missed two questions on that worksheet. We'll send them a voice note or a video explanation saying, Hey, Johnny, this is why we missed those two questions. This is what we need to do instead to avoid making that mistake. And they may have that video if they if they miss those questions at 11:30 in the morning, they may have that video by 2:30 in the afternoon. And so by the time they get home from school at three o'clock or 3:30, they can now go review their mistakes and start working on doing those questions the right way and building the right muscle memory. That's just not going to happen if you have to set up a brand new tutoring session or whatever it may be, coordinate schedules with your tutor. You may not be able to get in with them until three days later, and that's three days of wasted time.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Right, right. No, I like that a lot. That's essentially what we try to build with our program too, just more coaching over tutoring. Um, you know, what is the biggest mistake you see students making when it comes to ACT prep?

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Yeah, so I think generally the the the biggest mistake that students make is so I guess that there are two ends of the spectrum. On the one, on the one side, there are students who just wait way too long to get a plan in place. And they just kind of think, look, I'm gonna pull out my prep booklet and I'll just you know start banging away and do some practice questions here or there, but they never really have a plan in place. I'd say that those students and those families are probably not the ones who are watching this. So on the other hand, the the families who want to, you know, do something super intense and go all in and all overboard and do those kind of 12-month uh preparation processes. And they just assume that longer is better. And they it kind of comes from that you were saying the hourly tutoring mindset that's ingrained in people is just more time is better. And they just assume, oh, my student is um starting junior year, it's junior year fall. Let's start tutoring now for the ACT and let's plan to take it in junior spring, six or seven or eight months later. And that that's that's just a huge mistake because it's gonna burn the student out, and it's not an efficient way of actually making progress. And so we see a lot of students come to us later on in junior year or even fall of senior year, and they've been working with other programs for eight months, 12 months, and the student is just burned out, and they come to us and they're like they are a lot of times able to put in a good four or six week sprint, but you know, by the end of it, they're fully, fully burnt out. And most of the time, you know, there was a student in Camden who who I had a quick little interview with her after she did our program. She was exactly in this situation. She was like, Man, if I had known about this short sprint model, I I would have saved an entire year of my time and thousands of dollars of my parents' tutoring budget because uh of how much they had spent working for an entire year in this in this program before uh coming to our short sprint model.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

So I guess why do you think there? I mean, you so you obviously have running a successful program for a couple years now, or for several years now. Excuse me. I I see it too. It's hard to kind of call it out, but it does. I don't know if it gets old for you having the same kind of conversation over and over again with parents of just like it's not all parents, right? But there are ones that are just looking for like they want the broken model, they want time, they want this time and this like somehow more hours equates equates more success. And I'm like, so you know, it's a very big belief break, at least on our end, of okay, uh, my kids spending five hours on a one AP subject every night, how are they gonna fit this in? I'm like, well, do you think like that's probably the problem? Like, do you think you need five hours every like that's 25 hours a week if you're not doing weekends, right? You know, like how is that even how is that even practical? And like when I'm like, well, how well how can you get some of four or five? I need an hour to an hour, maybe two hours per subject per week. So how is that possible? Because we're not worried about content, we're teaching a system, we're teaching skills and all it if you just and it's like because they're I think I'll let you answer. Let me be a bad podcaster, but I mean that's I hear it so much, I say it so much, so it's but it sounds so parallel to the conversations you have. What is your theory on that? Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Well, yeah, I mean it it's very easy to to what want to just put your thoughts in because I know it's something that we we both hear all the time. Um and uh everybody in our company hears this as well, at least with students who are first joining the program and families who are first joining the program. I I think it it comes from a good place, it comes from parents who probably worked incredibly hard themselves and still probably do work incredibly hard themselves. And they've they've been rewarded for putting in a lot of hard work, either you know, back when they were in school or in their jobs or whatever it is that they do, hard work gets rewarded, and hard work is a great thing to be rewarded for. Um, but I think it can go down the wrong direction when it's like, hey, we don't need to be studying for three hours a day or four hours a day or five hours a day. Again, if you just come from the mindset of more work is better, then yeah, I guess it's an easy mindset to come from when you are a hard worker yourself and you've been rewarded for that. But you have to look at the efficiency of the work that's being done. And and that's that's the biggest thing that I often say is there comes a point of diminishing and even negative marginal returns from more time. There was a student was early on when I was kind of back in my tutoring days, uh, named Vikram. And he, you know, he and his his his parents, his dad was an incredibly hard worker himself, and he just assumed, you know, more work is better. And so Vikram, he had his son Vikram working two hours a day, every single day, and he wanted to do that for six months on the ACT. And I was, you know, working with the I wasn't doing two hours every single day of tutoring sessions with them, but I was, you know, guiding them along the process. And his score actually went up at first. I think he started in the maybe the mid-20s, and he had worked his way up to uh, I think a 30 or 31 on some of our practice tests. But then, you know, after two months or so of that two hours a day, every single day, his scores actually started going back down in the in the negative direction into the upper 20s. And so that that I guess that was just because he had fully burnt out. He was like he would sit down to ACT practice and he just couldn't even stomach it. Like a 16-year-old, 17-year-old kid just isn't able to the they don't have the stamina to do that. Um, and I I I don't have the mental stamina to do that. I wouldn't be able to do do that either. So that's perfectly perfectly understandable. Um, but when you contrast that with another student that I worked with at the time, um named Carter, you know, he actually started out at a 23. He did a one short sprint for six weeks, and after that period of time, we went from a 23 to a 30. Vikram ended up, I think, scoring somewhere in, I think it was a around a 27. And so smaller improvement, even with 10 times the number of hours. And I think I just have to bring up these kind of concrete examples to some of these families uh who do value hard work, and that's a great thing, but yeah, you that those some of those beliefs do need to be broken around just more is better. I think efficient is is better.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

And so you're the system that's offering efficiency, and so you know what is the big difference between um a 10K program from like Princeton or Kaplan or something like that, or six to 10k and what you're ultimately trying to do.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

Yeah, so I I guess I'm not super familiar with exactly what those programs offer. Um what what would you say they well?

SPEAKER_01 33:01

I think it's similar promises, right? That they're offering, like, you know, I'm I'm more I'll be honest, I'm more familiar with like Princeton's like 1400 guarantee program or 1500, something like that. But it's a big investment. Uh, I'm pro I'm still sticker shocked by like I have a webinar tonight, and uh I'll throw it up there of like this is what Princeton charges like 6k for their guaranteed five, and ours is a fraction of that cost. I just think we have a better system. Um you know, or maybe, but I also I I ethically, as an educator, my kids taking five SAT five APs and they want fives, and then is that 30k? And I'm like, you know, okay, obviously Princeton maybe gets it, but I you're you're attracting a very small margin of people who can actually afford that when there's a lot of kids who could benefit from the help that they should be getting. So I guess you know, you're offering a different way. I guess just speak more about um how it's a little more accessible for some of the families you work with.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

And so we we we do definitely charge a premium. Uh we're not not nearly as high as you know, some of the $10,000 programs out there normally and most circumstances. Um, but we we do offer a very good ROI for for most of our families, and and we try and position it that way. And we try and you know work with families who are gonna benefit from um, you know, we we we guarante we guarantee four extra points on the ACT. And uh we work with families who are gonna benefit from that in terms of better colleges, less time spent wasted, and ultimately more the big financial ROI is gonna be the the increased scholarships that you get. There are tons of analyses that you could do on the value of an ACT point, extra ACT point. There was a study done a while back that shows that each extra point gives you about $8,500 in scholarships. And that was back in 2018 before a lot of the crazy inflation. So we we conservatively estimate that each extra point now gives at least ten thousand dollars in extra scholarships. And you know, you you can see that in in the the the ROI number. So if you you come into our program, you add four or five extra points. That's conservatively 40 or 50,000 in scholarships. We've had students who who have gotten way more than that. I think you mentioned one of our students got $88,000 at SMU. That was a student at Ava years back. We recently had a student in Meredith grab a full scholarship, full, full tuition, full ride, uh housing, stipends and everything at University of Kentucky. It's worth over $230,000. Um, and so yeah, we we do charge and so yeah, our our program investment is in in the thousands of dollars, but you know, we we we we definitely you know try and frame it as hey, you're gonna get a great return on this investment, and your your kids are gonna wait uh save a lot of time. You're gonna, as a parent, you're gonna save a lot of headache. And you know, whether it is, you know, more college options or just significantly more scholarships, you're gonna get both of them from coming into our program.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

Love it. So um we're gonna move into lightning round. These are just rapid fire questions. First thing that comes to mind, no explanation needed unless you really want to. Does that sound good? Sounds good. You ready? All right. I might throw, I might throw one in there. All right, let's before I enter this because I'm gonna throw in a question not on my question bank, but are you in a are you in a contributing alumni member of the U Chicago?

SPEAKER_02 36:33

Yes. Okay. Well, I'll get to I'll get to it in a second. Because I we have kids that go to U Chicago. So uh let's just start later. Why is it called I heard this now from multiple sources?

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Why is it known as the school where fun goes to die? Where fun goes to die is because there's a lot of time spent in the library.

SPEAKER_02 36:52

Isn't that like all top schools? Or what what is it about you Chicago that gets that that association with it?

SPEAKER_00 36:58

So I I I actually think uh most top schools once you get there, um, a lot of the reputation, unless there are a few exceptions, but like it's like Harvard schools. The reputation that I've heard, I I can't speak because I didn't go to those schools, but the reputation that I've heard is you get in, once your foot's in the door there, yeah, they they really make it a a lot easier to succeed. Uh, I I can't say that that was my experience at University of Chicago. Did you spend a lot of time in the library though? I spent a lot of time in the library, but uh I also found you know some of my best friends there as well. And yeah, I I I played baseball there too, and so I I had a great group of friends on the baseball team that I enjoyed spending time with. But honestly, it's a very unique place, the University of Chicago. And I think they're if you're if you're not somewhat of a unique person, then you you may not thrive there.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Um they're gone away from score optional now, score optional. So Stanford this year changed their policy. If you take an AP course, you have to submit your scores. Uh U Chicago is implementing that by and by next year. I expect all the Ivy Leagues to do the same, kind of moving pendulum swing back the opposite, not just score optional for no longer score optional for SAT ACT, but also mandatory score reporting on your AP exams, too. Um, so all right, rap. Sorry, I didn't want to set you up. That's like rapid fire. I'm like, that's what because uh I hear that a lot. What does that mean? Cool. All right. Um, you ready? Yep. All right, most overrated ACT prep strategy right now. Uh 12 months of preparation. One thing parents overthink about their kids' test scores.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

Ooh, overthink. I'd say maybe the gap between 34 and 36.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

What about one thing they underthink?

SPEAKER_00 38:47

The value of instant feedback or rapid, rapid feedback cycles.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

If you could whisper one piece of advice to the parent of a sophomore right now, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 38:58

Ooh, parent of a sophomore. I'd say if they've taken algebra two, I'd say start your ACT prep now. If they haven't taken algebra two, I would say um go have them do something fun that they enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

Best free resource for ACT prep that most people don't know about. My YouTube channel. There you go. Soft promo. Uh, one book or resource every high achieving family should have.

SPEAKER_00 39:22

Uh, one book or resource that every high achieving family should have. I would say grit by Angela Duckworth.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

What's the next big shift you see coming in standardized testing?

SPEAKER_00 39:37

I guess I may maybe I I'll I'll assume that I'm ahead of this and I feel like it's already happening because I I'm in the world, but I feel like the the shift is just returned to standardized test mandatory um for college admissions.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

All right. Well, Carson, this has been great. This has been very, very valuable. Uh, we have interviewed some people for SAT, but not a lot of ACT specialties. So um I know parents are gonna want to go deeper. So, where is the best place for them to find you and find out what you offer and where to check you out at?

SPEAKER_00 40:10

So we put out a ton of good um informational content for free over on our YouTube channel. It's boosted brains36. You could probably either YouTube search Carson Weekly or Boosted Brains uh 36 for the perfect ACT score. And same thing over on Instagram, Boosted Brains36. And then if you're interested in in more of our ACT coaching program, getting hands-on help from from myself or my team, you know, boostedbrains36.com is where you can learn more about all that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

And before we wrap, what's the one thing you want people to remember from this conversation?

SPEAKER_00 40:43

Man, it's just uh efficiency and just don't don't do that six to twelve months of preparation when you could do six to eight weeks instead.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Well, Carson, thank you. I do appreciate you sharing everything. I appreciate your time coming on. I know you know it's in between test prep seasons uh for us, uh, and it's it's always busy in the game. So uh, but for everyone listening, remember you don't have to play the game the way the system wants it to, the way it's set up. You can find the foundation, you can build the skills, and you can get the results without the burnout. I really like how Carson kind of framed it in that it's really a six to eight week sprint, and those skills can stack very quickly. So we're gonna put all the links that we discussed in the show notes. Um, and I again thank you for turn tuning in to the supported learning podcast, and we'll see you next time. Carson, thank you. It was a pleasure. Absolutely. Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.