The Segal Method

Nothing is taught until something is measured. Every engagement begins with a full-length official practice test taken under exact conditions — real timing, real breaks, the adaptive format where the exam uses one. We then analyze the result at the level of individual questions, not section scores.

Every error is sorted into one of three categories: content gaps (rules or methods the student does not know), process failures (methods known but executed unreliably), and timing artifacts (questions rushed, skipped, or reached with too little time). The three categories demand three different treatments, and most preparation fails precisely by treating them alike. The diagnostic closes with a written score plan: the target, the timeline, and the evidence for both.

The diagnostic produces a curriculum built for one student. Hours are allocated where the error map says the points are — and pointedly not where they are not. A student missing only advanced combinatorics and comma-splice questions spends zero hours reviewing material already mastered, which is where commercial courses spend most of theirs.

The curriculum is a written document the family can read: what will be covered, in what order, with which official materials, and how progress will be measured. It is revised after every practice test rather than followed blindly — a plan that cannot change with the evidence is a syllabus, not a strategy.

Sixty minutes. One tutor. One student. Never groups, never pairs, never a rotating cast of instructors. The tutor named in your consultation conducts every session of the engagement.

Sessions alternate direct instruction with supervised problem-solving, because the errors that block a top score appear only when the student is working and an expert is watching. A classroom moves at the median of its enrollment; a private hour goes wherever this student's data says it must. That difference — not charisma, not materials — is why one-on-one instruction outperforms every alternative at the top of the scale.

Preparation succeeds or fails in the hours the tutor is not present. Every session ends with assigned practice: narrow, targeted sets aimed at the week's specific weakness, never generic volume. The student reviews every error the same day and explains it in writing — because an error understood at the moment of correction is retained, and one glanced at is repeated.

The tutor reviews the work before the next session and maintains a running error log across the engagement. Questions between sessions are answered directly. Volume without review consolidates bad habits; a thousand unexamined practice questions can make a student worse. We assign less and extract more.

Every two to three weeks, a full-length official practice test under real conditions — used as a measurement instrument, not a workout. Each test is reviewed in writing: the score trajectory, the error-category shifts, and what the next block of sessions will now target.

Every ambitious engagement plateaus at least once; the difference between practices is what happens next. Ours recalibrates: the error log tells us whether the plateau is content, process, or pacing, and the curriculum changes accordingly. Parents receive scheduled briefings throughout, so the state of the engagement is never a mystery.

The final weeks sharpen rather than build. Practice tests move to the exact hour of the real appointment. The error log shrinks to a page. Logistics are rehearsed — the route, the materials, the timing of the morning — and the last week tapers deliberately, because students who cram the final days reliably underperform their own practice scores.

The intent is that the official sitting is the least novel test the student has taken: the sixth or seventh performance of a rehearsed piece, not an opening night. Scores are made in the weeks before; test day is where they are collected.