Many parents and students express apprehension about the decision to get a tutor for the SAT or the ACT, and that’s natural. If you’re finding the process stressful, consider yourself normal. Test preparation and tutoring is an investment of time and money and all parents strive to provide the best access to test prep that they can for their kids–and everyone involved is actively hoping for the best possible SAT or ACT scores.

Adding the element of tutoring online to that mix sometimes causes that much more concern: the technology is still relatively new and most parents don’t spend much time chatting with their friends on Skype or iChat, so it’s completely unfamiliar terrain for them especially. Even some students express concern, since they’re accustomed to being in the same physical room with their teachers.

Let’s face it: change can be scary. Tutoring online was even scary for us when we started doing it.

Elizabeth King has been working with students all over the country for years–at some points she was traveling weekly to meet with students face-to-face. At this point, though, that kind of travel is no longer necessary (…and we can only promise you that if we thought for a split second that it were, we’d refuse to work online. We’re putting our reputations on the line here.). The software and hardware used for online tutoring has become so intuitive that within a few minutes students forget that’s there’s any difference at all.

Simultaneously, there are some real benefits of online tutoring:

1. You’re not dragging yourself around in a carpool, thinking about leaving 1/2 hour before and worrying when you’re going to eat dinner. Frankly, we encourage students to snack and be casual while we’re working.
2. You can be working on another task up until the last minute before you begin your test prep, so you’re not cutting in on valuable homework, studying, or the extremely important downtime that all teenagers need. Once we’re finished, you can can go right back to what you were doing before we began.
3. Germs aren’t spreading. Seriously. If you have a cold, if we have the flu, provided everyone’s mentally in the game, we have nothing to worry about.
4. It’s easy to pull resources and examples from the internet and exchange files on the fly, which we’ve found ultimately leads to a much more enriching educational experience–and the more enriched test prep is, the more likely it is to stick.