Week-long camp plots ACT strategy
NEWPORT - Mark Treas and Rhett Barbour despise the ACT college entrance exam.
"College admissions won't even give a thought to a kid unless they achieve a certain score on it," Barbour said.
So the two eccentric friends have made a business out of showing students how to beat it.
Both 28 years old and from Fort Thomas, they are co-owners of ACT Boot Camp. They sold out their camp this week to 70 Northern Kentucky and Greater Cincinnati students here at Newport on the Levee.
It's a 40-hour week of intense training - not on how to improve their knowledge in ACT subject areas, but on how to better take the test to raise scores and earn scholarships. The camp was timed with the ACT exam, which will be administered Saturday nationwide.
The course costs $300. Most students in it have taken the ACT at least once. The company guarantees they will raise their scores after taking the course. Those who don't can take the course again for free. If they don't raise their scores after that, they get their money back.
The company has taught hundreds of students in its first two years, and expects to serve about 600 students this year alone. Only four have come back to retake it, Treas said. Nobody has asked for a refund.
He said the company has saved families more than $1.7 million in college tuition.
"We have students who are AP students, they get straight As for four years of high school, yet they still have this one multiple choice test they have to get through," Treas said. "We try to get them to buy into us, and we train the heck out of them."
The "buy in" comes through their sense of humor and unusual approach that the ACT is more foe than friend.
"They're very funny, definitely know their audience and they're blunt about the ACT," said Rachel Poston, a senior at Seton High School in Cincinnati. "It's not 'You can do this.' It's 'This sucks that you have to take this test, and you can beat the system.'"
ACT is a timed test, so one of the primary focuses of the camp is speed. For example, on the reading portion, they teach students how to scan the passage, find important words, make notes and answer the questions, all in a certain amount of time. In the math section, rather than teaching calculus to a student who hasn't taken it, they provide certain formulas that can answer many of the problems.
Students are drilled over and over all week.
"It's a lot of tricks in time management," said Chase Zimmer, a senior at Covington Catholic High School. He is at the camp with Covington Catholic classmates Nick Ackley and David Moser.
"I wanted to get my score up and I heard they were good," David said. "They're kind of crazy, but they keep you interested."
By Friday, each student will have taken a practice test five or six times.
Rachel scored a 25 on it the first time she took the ACT earlier this year. After two days of boot camp drills, she scored a 29 on a practice test. Though she has a 3.7 grade point average, she knows she'll need a high ACT score to go to one of the three colleges she's looking at: Vanderbilt University, Miami University or Loyola University Chicago.
"This camp is absolutely worth it," she said.
Besides the boot camp, the class is held over a five-week period at schools during the school year. For information, visit www.theactbootcamp.com.
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