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SoFlo Tutors Review
Our detailed review of the SoFlo SAT tutoring service after using their program
Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, the college admissions process has become more competitive than ever, especially with respect to elite universities. In fact, some schools’ admissions rates have dipped below 4%. Thus, in a reversal of recent admissions trends, the SAT is making a major comeback as an opportunity for students to set themselves apart. And one company that seems to be surging up the rankings of SAT tutoring services is SoFlo Tutors. In this detailed breakdown, we cover our experience with them and whether we think SoFlo is worth it.
As this is a lengthy, detailed review, we’ve added helpful jump-to links above for your convenience. Hopefully be the end, you’ll have a good idea of whether tutoring program is right for you.
How The Tutoring Program Works
Once you sign up with SoFlo, one of the first things that will happen is that their operations team will match you up with a tutor who they feel is a good fit your learning style, personality and needs. This matching process is a big part of SoFlo’s program, as they feel best-fit is critical to student success.
Part of their concept is the idea that students learn more and perform better when they have a tutor that they find engaging and generally enjoy spending time with. I tend to agree with this theory, and also like how SoFlo approaches this.
Basically, if you don’t have a good connection with your tutor after the first session, you can ask for a tutor switch. But it’s not a big deal, and they in fact encourage it. They don’t want you to feel any social pressure or weirdness about transferring to a different tutor.
A SoFlo tutoring session
Because of the importance they lay on finding a great fit, there are no hard feelings or weird circumstances. Everyone understands that sometimes personalities don’t jive and you might have to go through a tutor or two before you find your best fit.
In any event, once you get hooked up with a tutor you jive with, the next step is completing a full-length diagnostic SAT exam.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve never even seen an SAT question before, or are coming in with a solid baseline score and knowledge. The point of the diagnostic is to gauge your strengths and weaknesses, as well how you approach different problem types.
This in turn allows your tutor to design a custom study plan for you that targets high-yield topics. They’ll do their best to identify areas where improvement will do you the most good and start chipping at away at improving your score from there.
They’ll work with you through sample problems, teach you hard content you need a refresher on, and provide testing hacks. In short, they’ll do whatever it takes to help you improve your weak spots and find some score gains.
In terms of how you get your tutoring, everything is done through on-on-one Zoom meetings. SoFlo uses some pretty nice online teaching tools like a digital whiteboard to make learning seamless from in-person instruction.
The SoFlo process
They’ll work sample problems right on the screen, pull up SoFlo prep material for review, and even quickly jump over to Google if they need to show you something. Again, whatever it takes to get you prepped – though I would say that most sessions are pretty structured.
Then following each session, you’ll be assigned two to three hours of homework per week. Like the session themselves, this work is narrowly targeted and meant to focus on areas of weakness where you can find big score gains.
Most of the homework comes in the form of practice sets and mock exams, as well as some material covering content review.
While some tutoring companies leverage other test prep companies’ materials, SoFlo actually uses their own first party prep materials. Meaning, they’ve designed their own curriculum.
I like this for a couple reasons. For one, it means their tutors are perfectly in sync with what they’re teaching. I’ve noticed with other tutoring companies that the tutors aren’t necessarily in alignment with the underlying material they use.
SoFlo uses their own prep materials
A problem will trip them up, they’ll question whether that makes sense (or is even right), and then waste a couple minutes of valuable time trying to reverse engineer the problem.
Thus, by using their own proprietary prep material, SoFlo teachers know the study materials they’re leveraging, and everything has been vetted by the very tutors that are teaching you.
Secondly, I like this because the materials come free with SoFlo tutoring. With those other tutoring companies that I just mentioned, not only will they charge you for their tutoring service, but they’ll also require that you go out and purchase a $400 prep course or access package.
The SoFlo classes take place over Zoom
By contrast, SoFlo’s materials come totally free with the tutoring. It’s all built into the price, making it a stronger value than some.
And lastly, I just like their first party materials. Their materials are detailed and comprehensive, as well as highly realistic of real SAT problems (just like the PrepScholar practice questions). Plus, their content review sections and problem explanations are written in fairly plain English. All in all, it’s a nice suite of SAT prep content.
SoFlo Packages & Pricing
In short, SoFlo offers two tiered rates, and which rate you pay turns in large part on the tutor you select. Essentially, SoFlo has two classes of tutors – Core and Premium.
The Core tutors are SoFlo’s standard tutors, while their Premium tutors are a handful of elite individuals, with much greater experience and higher ratings.
Tutoring services with one of the Core tutors costs $60/hour, while Premium tutors run for $90/hour. Regardless of which tier of tutor you go with, everything with SoFlo is on a pay-as-you-go contract basis. There are no long term commitments and you can stop service whenever you want.
The SoFlo Guarantee
SoFlo Tutoring offers one primary type of guarantee: a satisfaction guarantee. This, however, can take two forms. If for whatever reason you don’t like SoFlo’s services or don’t feel like you’re getting your money’s worth, you can ask for your money back and cancel immediately.
Basically, SoFlo wants to make sure they’re earning your business (and your money).
Alternatively, if you’re not satisfied with your individual tutor, like I mentioned above, you can always switch tutors. In that sense, they also want to guarantee you’re satisfied with your tutoring partner (Magoosh and Princeton Review offer guarantees for their courses as well).
We found the SoFlo tutors and curriculum to be solid
Now, personally, I would like to see a score guarantee here. The money back guarantee is great and a very nice insurance policy, but a lot tutoring services offer minimum score increase guarantees.
To their credit, SoFlo does claim that students improve 110 points on the SAT on average after 10 sessions, which is great, but it would be nice to see that embodied in some sort of guarantee.
Verdict: SoFlo Tutors Review
All in all, I was pretty impressed with SoFlo and had a positive experience. The tutor they matched me up with was awesome. In terms of substantive knowledge and communication skills, I couldn’t have been happier. He seemed genuinely invested in helping me excel.
If there is a downside with SoFlo, it’s that their program isn’t as advanced as mega companies like Varsity Tutors in terms of having an integrated digital platform with a one-stop shop for homework assignments, performance analytics, classes, etc.
They’re a smaller, but more hands on team, concerned less with tech and more on their students. And I like this. If you’re thinking about going with SoFlo for your SAT tutoring, I wouldn’t hesitate. After all, you can always get your money back and try somewhere else if you’re not happy.
Yes. Not only do the SoFlo tutors clearly have a mastery of the necessary content (they are all 99th percentile scorers), but more importantly, they are good communicators. It seems like SoFlo has done a nice job only selecting individual tutors that have great personalities and are solid communicators.
How much does SoFlo tutoring cost?
SoFlo charges between $60 and $90 per hour depending on which package you go with.
Is SoFlo tutoring worth it?
Yes, after having used SoFlo’s services, we were really satisfied. In terms of cost, they are about on par with other tutoring services, but dollar for dollar, it felt like we got more as they were preparing for every session and seemed genuinely invested.
