Student Outreach Jumps 70 Percent in 2021 Through Continued School District, Institution Partnerships
Student Outreach Jumps 70 Percent in 2021 Through Continued School District, Institution Partnerships
Through 10 successful years of partnering with school districts and institutions on college readiness services and resources, MasteryPrep has surpassed one million students served since the company’s founding in 2012. To date, MasteryPrep has impacted a total of 1,129,600 students.
MasteryPrep increased its student outreach by 70 percent in 2021, serving 341,000 students, compared to 205,000 in 2020. In 2021, MasteryPrep partnered with 625 school districts and institutions, an increase of 25 percent from 500 districts in 2020. With mastery-based college readiness services for the SAT®, ACT®, TSIA2, WorkKeys®, and end-of-course exams, MasteryPrep resources are used in 47 states nationwide.
MasteryPrep is ranked among the Inc. 5000 “Fastest Growing Companies,” featured by “Entrepreneur 360,” and selected among the “Growth Leaders” by Louisiana Economic Development.
“We continue to deliver innovative, robust, and equitable college readiness learning resources to help our partner districts and schools achieve sustainable score and performance gains year after year, and thereby positively impacting the futures and opportunities for their students after high school,” said Craig Gehring, MasteryPrep Founder and CEO. “The last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have forced schools to become more flexible than ever in pivoting back and forth from in-person to virtual instruction, and I am proud of our team for making an unprecedented adjustment as well to meet our partners’ diverse needs.”
Gehring, who attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School, received perfect scores on both the ACT and the SAT. He became a test prep tutor, where he saw that struggling students had different needs than high achievers. Gehring wanted to create a tool that would bring test prep to a much broader audience. He founded MasteryPrep with the goal of leveling the playing field by making effective, robust test prep available to students of all backgrounds through their schools.
“MasteryPrep was designed to level the playing field in standardized test prep. By working through schools and teachers, we’re able to reach a wider population, including underserved schools and communities,” Gehring said. “We believe every student can improve academically and gain college readiness skills with the right tools and support system in place.”
MasteryPrep is the nationally preferred SAT and ACT prep provider of the Council for Opportunity in Education (COE). COE is a nonprofit that works with federal TRIO programs to assist low-income, first-generation students and students with disabilities as well as other marginalized student groups to prepare for and succeed in college. The partnership between COE and MasteryPrep expands college opportunities for low-income, first-generation students and students with disabilities in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., the Pacific Islands, and Puerto Rico.
“The tough reality is that nearly 90 percent of low-income students graduate high school without a college-ready ACT or SAT score, and our company’s founding hallmark was to address standardized test achievement gaps between low-income students and their more advantaged peers,” Gehring said. “We have developed the only prep curricula designed from the ground up to help schools boost their students’ scores. Instead of teaching to the test, we help students develop core academic skills.”
Unlike traditional test prep options, MasteryPrep doesn’t rely primarily on self-guided study and timed practice tests. Rather, it is designed to provide more structured and robust support so that all students have the tools to improve their test-taking abilities and scores.
MasteryPrep’s training is also aligned to high school curriculums, not just standardized tests, so it can be used by teachers to support their regular classroom instruction.
Following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, MasteryPrep accelerated its technology development, building a new platform and retooling its resources to fit a virtual environment due to school closures. For example, MasteryPrep launched Study Hall, an online adaptive test prep program that uses a student’s testing data to chart the path of least resistance to increase their score.
MasteryPrep also developed Snap Course, a micro-video course platform that allows students to watch thousands of short instructor videos and answer practice questions, among other simulated activities.
Programs such as Study Hall and Snap Course are components of the MasteryPrep Ready Platform, a data-driven, blended learning solution for schools and school districts to purchase MasteryPrep resources and products under one comprehensive suite.
Additional MasteryPrep resources include TruScore Practice Testing and Analysis, Elements, Decoding the ACT/SAT Professional Developments, The College Playbook, Mastery Curriculum, Booster Classes, and Boot Camps. The MasteryPrep Ready Platform is fully adaptable to any academic environment, virtual or in-person, and accessible and equitable to all students.
MasteryPrep Ready is designed around three pillars of mastery: Start Early, Master What Matters, and Finish Strong. “By supporting students throughout their high school career, MasteryPrep helps students master key content, time management, and test-taking skills; reinforces college readiness as early as middle school and helps educators build a college-going culture on campus,” Gehring said.
Over the last two years, at its peak, MasteryPrep delivered more than 100 virtual classes a day. From Anchorage, Alaska, across the map to Miami, Florida, the quick pivot to expand into virtual instruction paid off and connected MasteryPrep with communities that, in the past, would likely have been beyond its reach.
In the early pandemic months, one unique business decision MasteryPrep made was to provide free programs and services to more than 200,000 students during school closures. “Because schools were hit at the end of their budget cycle, nobody had saved money to be able to get virtual programs for their kids in March 2020,” Gehring said. “The first step was we took everything that we could provide for free, and we bundled it, and we provided it to both our customers and anyone in the K-12 space that was experiencing closures. We were focused on helping our partners.”
That need has only grown stronger following the pandemic as educators try to minimize the learning loss felt by many students nationwide. “We have to get more students ready for college and change the trajectory of the threat from the pandemic.”
In the early pandemic months, MasteryPrep provided free programs and services to more than 200,000 students during school closures.
