A study in preparation
Testive.com in the business of learning how to help students improve their SAT scores
The developers and engineers at Testive.com were busy at the end of the summer preparing the website for the launch of the ACT prep rollout.
September 24, 2014
Junior and senior years of high school are filled with stress, especially as students stare at SAT and ACT prep books, trying to learn the tests’ ins and outs. This is the norm that Testive is trying to change.
As a startup company, Testive is looking to bring test prep to the virtual world at www.testive.com — and all for free, too.
Behind the closed doors of LearnLaunch, the company’s suite near the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, the Testive office immediately gives off a friendly, casual feeling. The company embodies the principle “don’t judge a book by its cover.” From tie-dye shirts to friendly banter, the staff appears relaxed, but behind the scenes one can see that the company is extremely active and making huge strides in changing the way test prep is done.
On Friday, Aug. 22, 2014, Testive had an all- staff meeting for its 16 employees led by marketing director Jackson Noel. The conference room was later filled with seven other team members, and Tom Rose, the CEO and a co-founder of Testive, who appeared on a laptop from his vacation location. Everyone was dressed in a casual manner for the summer, in T-shirts (some with T-shirts printed with Testive’s distinctive Sly Fox logo), shorts, and sandals.
From top to bottom, the company is an outlier, starting with just how information is calibrated. In this case, calibrating information means to finding the difficulty level of each question. Traditionally, SAT prep companies just look at whether the question was answered either correctly, or incorrectly. Testive adds another a layer to this by looking at key data, such as how long a student took to answer a question, and how the problem was actually solved. This information ends up helping the student study more efficiently, and also gives a more accurate representation of which questions belong in each score range.
Another testament to Testive’s strong work ethic is the fact that a whopping 519 videos have been created to help teach concepts and explain problems to students, and the company constantly works on new videos, while also updating older ones. However, the one quality that really sets Testive apart is the company’s dedication to humanizing their platform.
As Tom Rose, the CEO and a co-founder of Testive, said, the company “aims to build relationships with students,” something that is impossible with a prep textbook. That’s why the company personalizes its content, allowing students to learn at their own pace, with instruction based on their strengths and weaknesses.
Testive’s desire is to make free test prep available to students everywhere. The online test preparation site helps students all over the world prepare for their college entry exams. The program helps students improve their scores by giving them access to practice questions, while encouraging them to reflect on incorrect answers.
Rose and the team decided to make Testive a free program mainly because “people asked for it,” and “the world is heading toward receiving free content.”
“With Testive, we just sort of hope that the universe will reward us,” said Rose.
The Testive team has one main goal: to “strike the right balance” with students. Although it was noted, with a laugh, that Testive makes “more and better improvements through mistakes.”
Testive.com features explanatory videos for each question to further aid students in their test preparation. Additionally, the company is expanding its services to include ACT preparation. After lots of research and development, Testive released its ACT site in September in hopes of helping even more test takers.
The coaching team, which works remotely, is also available for those who seek help, and is dedicated to helping students improve their scores. Testive’s paid service includes one-on-one meetings with a top scoring coach who will guide a student through the testing process. Realizing the differences among everyone’s testing ability, coaches pinpoint a student’s needs by monitoring practice history in each subject area. The Testive team then proceeds to help the student reflect, while providing strategies for improvement and explanations of incorrect answers.
Testive’s coaching system is ideal because of its flexible scheduling. Cyber meetings are scheduled at times convenient for each student, and coaches regularly contact students and parents about their program use and improvements. The coaches also send their students daily study reminders and messages of encouragement. For those trying hard to improve their scores, the team offers this advice: “Keep studying and practicing even if you’re not seeing ‘significant marginal’ improvement.”
It can be hard to stay motivated while studying for the SAT. The test is designed to trick you. But students need to continue to answer and reflect on answers to improve.
“Even if you don’t see your projected SAT score increase more than 10 or 20 points [on the Testive practice system], it doesn’t mean you’re not improving, and that your actual testing day score won’t improve,” said John Leplante, head of the Testive coaching team.
During the hour-long staff meeting, the Testive team discusses the ACT rollout, the growth of online users, and the numbers of students involved with individualized coaching.
Before joining Testive, Noel was in business school while sales director Andrea Schlageter was involved with politics. Testive’s marketing process relies more on parents than students. Therefore, most of the ads are targeted toward adults, especially the mobile ads.
Unfortunately, despite the rising success of the mobile ads, the mobile budget was set to be reduced because mobile ads are very expensive, especially with the back-to-school competition of stores such as Target.
A recent webinar — a free online web-based-seminar — did very well. The Testive webinar contained six secrets that could help students reach their ACT/SAT goals.
The biggest factors in the humanization of Testive’s platform are the site’s engineers and developers. According to head developer and engineer David Chippendale, “The developers don’t just create and manage” Testive’s website, like one would expect. In fact, the job is as multi-faceted as they come.
At Testive, the developers take in all the problems that anyone — coaches, students, even sales reps — has, and fix them to make the website more beneficial for everyone. Furthermore, the developers are able to take requests from anyone who uses the site and then update the site in order to make it more welcoming. This allows Testive’s workers to build a stronger, more positive relationship not only with each other, but all of its users.
If nothing else, the developing team’s upbeat attitude makes the work environment much more comfortable.
Testive looks forward to further development and expansion. Rather than stay one-dimensional, the company looks to offer test prep for all standardized tests, ranging from the SAT to the MCAT.
For more information on the company, and to get started using the site for test prep, go to Testive.com.
–Sept. 24, 2014–
