Who We Are

Want to hear from the founders of Summit Prep about what makes Summit Prep uniquely positioned to help your students succeed? Check out a 16-minute podcast episode from Tests and the Rest featuring Eva Addae and David Blobaum.

Postcast episode

About Summit Prep

Summit Prep is a premier tutoring company that specializes in private, personalized tutoring. We provide both in-person and online tutoring from our tutoring centers in Short Hills and Bernardsville, New Jersey.

In order to provide students with the best possible education to help them succeed in life, we attract, train, and retain top talent. To do so, we offer full-time salaries and full benefits and hire only the best. Each instructor then goes through over 160 hours of customized SAT and ACT training and must pass stringent post-training assessments before they can start teaching our students.

Our curriculum is 100% derived from the real SAT and ACT exams so that we can target each student’s needs with the highest quality content.

In sum, we equip the best instructors with the best teaching content to get the best results.

And the results speak for themselves: our students genuinely learn the content and skills needed to achieve significant score increases. What do people say after working with us? 99% of our 300+ reviews are 5-stars.

It is our privilege to work with students, and we hope you will give us the opportunity to show you how we can help your child succeed.

 

Our Mission Statement

To empower students to succeed in life.

 

Our Vision Statement

Summit Prep is committed to the edification of individuals, both for their benefit and for that of the world. We endeavor to enrich the intellectual lives of our students in order to help them achieve their life goals and to enhance their contribution to society. And, because intellect without integrity is empty, we aim to show students love, respect, and empathy in order to cultivate their humanity as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

We founded Summit Prep in 2013.

If a group of students would like to be tutored together, we will accommodate them, but the vast majority of our students choose to be tutored individually because our curriculum is designed to be tailored to each student’s needs and because effective individual tutoring allows for the greatest and fastest possible score increase.

Classes have to be taught to the average student: so neither those at the top or bottom of the class benefit as much from the class, and the content covered only teaches the most commonly tested topics (so students will never see the less frequently tested topics that they will need to know in order to reach their potential and achieve the highest possible score). Groups instruction can be more customized than class instruction if students with similar scores are taught together. But, still, by definition, it is not possible to tailor group lessons to best meet the needs of each individual (unless all the students missed the exact same questions and learned at the same rate with the same learning style). But individual tutoring allows our tutors to teach students the specific content they personally need, at the pace that fits them best, with the teaching style that is most effective for them.

For those reasons, individual tutoring offers the best possible instruction. And, because entrance exams have such high stakes and are so important, you want the best.

All of our entrance exam tutors are full-time test preparation experts. If your child needs to learn History, you would want a History teacher to instruct your child. Standardized tests are no different. In order for students to attain the highest possible score, they need to learn from an expert on the standardized test.

The foundation of quality is great people. We hire the best (we recruit nationally, not just from NJ, and hire only 1% of applicants), and we train better than anyone else. Before our SAT or ACT tutors meet with their first student, they are given a minimum of 160 hours of training. Every tutor is trained individually, not in a group or class. If you are working with one of our SAT tutors for example, that tutor takes the SAT him/herself, has done thousands of SAT questions, and, most importantly, gets great results.

How do you know we attract and retain the best people? Our tutors receive full-time salaries and full benefits: health, vision, and dental insurance, long and short term disability insurance, life insurance, and retirement benefits. No other tutoring companies, of which we are aware, offer as much to their employees. As a result, we are able to attract and retain the best instructors, which allows us to offer our students the best prep.

 

We created our curriculum from an intensive study of the last 20 years of real SATs and ACTs. If we teach it, it’s on the test. And, although true perfection may be impossible, that does not mean we ever stop pursuing it. We do not assign your child to a one-size fits all curriculum. We provide every student with a custom curriculum tailored to fit their individual needs.

 

  • We recommend that students start out with a mock test to find out their baseline score (if they’re preparing for college entrance exams, then we recommend they take both a mock SAT and ACT so that we can determine which test fits them best).
  • Once we have a baseline score, we can estimate how much tutoring it will take for a student to reach his or her score goal. Based on the time until they need that score and how much tutoring it will take to reach it, we can then recommend how much tutoring the student should do per week.
  • We then assign students to complete real past exams for homework. During sessions, we review the exams but, most importantly, assess which topics the student missed, give them lessons on those topics, and additional questions — all sourced from the real exams — on those topics until they have mastered the question types that they missed. Decent tutors give students homework from third-party test prep providers. Good tutors give students homework from the real past exams. The best tutors (which we are) give students the real past exams for homework and then target the questions wrong with more authentic questions on those same topics to target and eliminate any weaknesses. This customized instruction allows students to reach their potential — and to do so as quickly and efficiently as possible.
  • Ideally, we’ll have enough tutoring sessions per week to assign and review an entire exam per week (that pace allows for gradual score increases that demonstrate readily visible progress; see our post on “Maintain Motivation and Secure Success”). But, understandably, some students do not have enough time to complete and review an entire exam per week, particularly during the school year. If that’s the case, then our progress will not be as fast, but, with consistent practice, the student will eventually reach their score goal.
  • We recommend that students take a full mock test at least once per month. Although students will be practicing the real tests for homework, it’s important to take the tests all at once (instead of as individual sections) so that students build their test-taking stamina and practice the pressure of test day.
  • The preparation, of course, looks a bit different for different tests, so please reach out to us with any questions. We are testing nerds, so we love talking about the tests and would be happy to answer any questions about them or our test preparation process.
 

Students will be provided with practice work from our test prep curriculum and past tests. We do not charge extra for any materials. All of our curriculum is 100% sourced from actual test content, so students will practice with the content that they will encounter on official exams. Additionally, our students have access to our weekly mock tests so that they can track their progress and assess and address testing strengths and weaknesses with their tutor.

We are data driven. We track the scores of every student before and after our tutoring. The result? Even if students were working with another company before — even for an entire year — our average increase is still 210 points on the SAT and 6 points on the ACT. Put us to the test. We’d love to help your children attain a better score and show them that they can not only reach their potential but that their potential is likely even better than they thought it could be.

 

Yes. Unless there was a reason to change instructors, students have the same instructor from determining their baseline score to achieving their score goal. The consistency of one tutor is important so that the tutor can learn the student’s learning style and adjust their teaching accordingly and so that families can communicate effectively with their tutor.

Yes. We offer complimentary diagnostic tests for all the entrance exams that we prepare students for, and we provide ongoing free mock tests to all students tutoring with us.

 

The overall cost of the prep depends on a student’s starting score, what their ultimate score goal is, and how much prep it will take to get there. We have three different tutoring tiers: Executive Educational Consultants, Expert Educational Consultants, and Professional Educational Consultants (the higher the tier, the longer tenure the tutor has typically had with Summit Prep, the more demand for their tutoring hours, and the more they can advise on all aspects of the testing and admissions process). All tutors at every tier have gone through a minimum of 160 hours of specialized training on the SAT and ACT before meeting with their first student, and their results are rigorously tracked to ensure the highest quality of instruction and the best outcomes.

We accept payment via ACH (checking/savings account), credit card, debit card, check, or money order. We offer installment plans for packages 20-60 hours. For further information regarding payment, packages, and installment plans please direct them to [email protected].

We build weekly, recurring session schedules for our students to maintain consistency and progress. Typically our students meet with their tutor a minimum of 1 hour per week. Homework/independent work is assigned between sessions and students are encouraged to take advantage of our mock tests. Our consultant will help coordinate when students should take mock tests and pick specific tests for their students. Students will review the results and go over any issues they might have encountered after each mock test.

 

We have always provided virtual sessions, years before the COVID-19 epidemic. Our students get the same results whether working with us in-person or on Skype. And, our two largest score increases this past year (two different students who both improved 16 points, from 19 to 35 on the ACT) were tutored virtually. We are experts at conducting sessions online, and we use additional tools to create an interactive workspace. Click here to see what a virtual session with Summit Prep looks like.