Dr. Li’s SAT camp was the first SAT camp I ever went to, and it was the only SAT camp I needed to achieve a good score on the real thing. This camp was a great fit for me and many others who struggle heavily on the reading and writing sections, as this camp drills deeply and extensively on each portion of the reading section, such as vocab, grammar, transitions, and reading comprehension. Also, despite math not being the main focus of the camp, making up only a fourth of the total class time each day, I still believed I improved in math, even though I know most of the crucial concepts and consistently score well on the math section in practice tests. For example, Dr. Li taught me the remainder theorem, a concept I didn’t know before, and it helped me significantly with math problems involving polynomial division.

Vocab was one of my greatest weaknesses, but Mr. Li’s exceptional approach to teaching it helped me improve significantly. Instead of doing the classic, mundane approach to teaching vocabulary by reading off the words and definitions on the packet and nothing else, Mr. Li taught us several more words that weren’t on the packet, such as idiosyncratic, defenestrate, and sinecure, and taught us to make a short, mental note of each word instead of memorizing the long, convoluted definition on the packet. When I went into this camp, I thought the vocab portion of the class would be the most boring, but Mr. Li made it into one of the most interesting parts of the camp.

Grammar is one of the most straightforward aspects of the reading section, and I thought I was decent at it, but after taking this camp I realized I still had a lot of room for improvement. I am always confused about verb tenses and plurals, but Mr. Goure made tackling these much more simple. He taught me that singular subjects need a singular verb, such as “the research team creates a presentation”, and plural subjects need a plural verb, such as “the research teams create a presentation”. Also, Mr. Goure strongly emphasized the importance of verb tenses and dedicated lots of time to them. Because of him, I was able to tackle the extremely tricky grammar problems on the real SAT without much difficulty.

This camp uses exclusively paper materials, and it benefits learning math the most. Instead of using Desmos for every problem, being on paper forces you to learn and understand the concepts and learn important formulas(like Vieta’s formulas) to help you save lots of time. This coupled with constantly hammering practice tests makes sure you learn almost everything the math section requires of you. After each practice test, Dr. Li made sure to explain anything we didn’t get and any other challenging problems. Of course, Desmos is a useful tool you should use on the actual SAT. It’s clearly faster to do a system of equations on Desmos than by hand, and learning the nuances of Desmos and tips and tricks to use it effectively is very helpful to save time, but it’s equally important to know when not to use Desmos. For example, instead of adjusting the slider on Desmos to find a line parallel or perpendicular to another line, it’s much faster to just know parallel lines have the same slope and perpendicular lines have slopes that are negative reciprocals.

In summary, this SAT camp definitely helped me improve and simplified many concepts I couldn’t wrap my head around. On my first mock test, I scored a 1480, but on the second I scored a 1540, a 60-point improvement in just 2 weeks. Ironically, my score on the real SAT was also a 1540, and it proves this improvement wasn’t just luck. Thank you Dr. Li for making this amazing course, and thank you for giving me the score I thought I would never achieve.