1,551 ratings
ACT nerd
Mandy H.
I turn SAT pressure into a repeatable game plan.
Education
Vanderbilt University
B.A. in Linguistics
Hometown
Memphis, Tennessee
A note from Mandy
“The SAT isn't a reading test or a math test — it's a puzzle with a known solution set, and the College Board always tips its hand if you know the tell. We won't "read more carefully." We'll learn exactly where the right answer is hidden, then go take it back. Every point on this test is a second serve: unglamorous, repeatable, and yours the moment you stop swinging for the ace.”
Mandy’s story
Mandy ghost-wrote the puzzle column for her high school paper off Cooper-Young in Memphis. When her SAT scores came back — a perfect 800 verbal, a 710 math she still grumbles about — she realized the Reading section was just a themeless crossword with worse clues. At 23 she published her first crossword in the LA Times syndicate, and the same instinct that lets her bury a pun in a grid is what lets her spot the one trap word the College Board hides in an answer choice. She has read every released SAT since 2016 and keeps a running tally of which wrong answers the test writers reuse. Her students don't get more vocab lists; they get a map of the traps.
What students say
4.9 ★ · 1,551 ratings
“I thought my problem was vocab. Mandy pulled my last three practice tests and showed me I was missing almost every dual-passage question and barely anything else. We drilled only those for three weeks. Reading & Writing went 600 to 710, total 1280 to 1450.”
“My son was stuck at 1340 after two other tutors. Mandy made him keep an 'error journal' tagging every miss by trap type — by his third practice test the careless misses were basically gone. He scored 1510 and got into his reach school early action.”
“She told me to read the punctuation before the words, which sounded insane, but it's how I finally stopped guessing on commas and semicolons. Writing & Language went 28 to 38 in under three months. One star off only because I wish we'd started in the fall instead of cramming the spring.”