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The Approach Matters Most

Academic Approach’s student-centric approach emphasizes skill mastery, critical thinking, and adaptability to prepare students for future challenges and achievements.

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Our Results

Academic Approach achieves remarkable results, boosting scores, scholarships, and college admissions, while fostering critical thinking and academic excellence.

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Throughout my time with Academic Approach, I saw a lot of results and overall I just became a better test taker.

Ben Schwan

New Trier High School

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High School Entrance Exams

Tailored prep for successful high school admissions

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ACT Testing

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SAT: Digital

Navigate the digital SAT

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Driving achievement with personalized academic guidance

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Visit us at our two Chicago-area offices.

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ACT

Boost Your ACT/SAT Scores: The Classroom Skills You Need to Know

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News and Press

Harvard Reverses Course, Reinstates SAT/ACT Requirement for Fall 2025 Applicants

April 12, 2024

ACT Floats Changes to its Digital Test

March 27, 2024

Illinois May Revert to the ACT

March 26, 2024

Test Optional?

While standardized tests are optional at many universities and colleges, many top schools are still taking test scores into consideration.

Check out our analysis of some top universities from the 2023 Common Data Set for college admissions.

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About Us

Our Approach

A student-centric approach focused on lifelong success

Mission & Vision

Empowering students, bridging educational gaps

Our Story

Pioneering skills-based test preparation since 2001

Our Team

Meet a Member of Our Team:

Jeremy Palmer

Director of Instructional Management

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Dear Academic Approach Families & Colleagues:

As families and schools are planning summer schedules, we are hearing many questions about using this summer—in particular—productively for both test preparation and academic tutoring.

3 Reasons Why Summer Instruction is Valuable

Combating summer learning loss

• It’s been well known and well researched that students on average lose 25-30% of school-year learning over the summer. What is not yet well known is how this rate of loss might be exacerbated now by a full year of remote and hybrid school learning. Anticipating and remediating that potential increase in learning loss raises the importance of this summer as an opportunity to engage students in needed academic skill building.

Assessing the student’s availability to learn

• Finding time during a busy school year to supplement learning is a challenge; many students are focused—as they should be—on staying abreast of day-to-day assignments and lack availability to either remediate skills in need of development or enrich those that can advance further.
• With more time and available working memory, concentrated instruction during summer can have a deep and lasting impact, helping students internalize skills deeply.

Building stronger outcomes

• Unsurprisingly, our data show that students who begin preparing for college entrance exams in the summer show greater growth on the final official test than those who begin during the school year; in fact, students who start the summer before junior year versus junior spring can double their growth.
  We’d love to help plan for the summer and work with you. Please call (773) 348-8914 or email us to schedule a complimentary assessment.

Be well,
Matthew Pietrafetta, Ph.D., Founder & CEO