In today’s competitive admissions landscape, the SAT is making a major comeback as an opportunity for students to set themselves apart. And one company that seems to be getting a lot of attention in the SAT tutoring services space 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.
Once you sign up with SoFlo, one of the first things that will happen is that their team will match you up with a tutor who they feel is a good fit your learning style, personality and needs. This matching process seems to be a big part of SoFlo’s program.
The idea that students perform better when they have a tutor that they find engaging and generally enjoy spending time with. I tend to agree with this theory, but didn’t really care for how SoFlo approaches this.
They make a big fuss about matching you with the perfect fit tutor, but it honestly felt like they just chose the tutor on their roster that had the most availability. It was just sort of random.
To their credit, you can ask for a tutor switch. However, we all know how awkward that can feel. After spending an hour with someone, you basically have to say you didn’t care for them and you want someone else. So although that option is technically there, it’s hard to follow through on.
In any event, once you get hooked up with a tutor you work well 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 study plan for you that targets higher-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. However, once again, while the underlying idea is on point, the execution was a little lacking.
It just didn’t feel to me like the study plan was all that custom. It felt like a template study plan with a few items stripped out.
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.
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. It felt like they’ll do whatever it takes to get you prepped.
The flip side of this, however, is that I would say that most sessions are pretty unstructured. Sessions were more free wheeling than I’ve experienced with other SAT prep programs.
Anyways, following each session, you’ll be assigned two to three hours of homework per week. This work is targeted and meant to focus on areas of weakness where you can find score gains.
Most of the homework comes in the form of practice sets and mock exams, as well as some material covering content review.
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While some tutoring companies leverage other test prep providers’ materials, SoFlo actually uses their own first party prep materials. Meaning, they’ve designed their own curriculum.
I like this for a couple reasons, but also dislike it. For the positive side, it means that 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.
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.
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.
However, the flip side of this decision is that the SoFlo materials just aren’t as good. The materials from major SAT prep providers are more detailed and comprehensive, as well as more realistic of real SAT problems.
A few examples that come to mind immediately include Kaplan, PrepScholar and others. The content review sections and problem explanations from these companies are written in fairly plain English and easy to understand.
All in all, SoFlo has a decent suite of SAT prep content, but I’d rather see them just license these materials from Princeton Review or Barron’s.
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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.
My analysis on pricing is that SoFlo is a reasonably good value for SAT tutoring and prep. It’s not the cheapest I’ve seen, nor is it the most expensive.
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, you can ask for your money back and cancel immediately.
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).
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.
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.
All in all, I had an OK experience with SoFlo. The first tutor they matched me up with wasn’t great, but I did connect pretty well with my second tutor. In terms of substantive knowledge and communication skills, I was happy with her. She seemed 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. But bottom line here, if you’re thinking about going with SoFlo for your SAT tutoring, I would maybe explore a couple other options first. We’ve had really good experiences with Kaplan and Princeton Review.
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I had an alright experience with SoFlo. The first tutor I got paired with wasn’t great, but I did connect well with my second tutor. She seemed very knowledgeable and the program as a whole was decent.
SoFlo charges between $60 and $90 per hour depending on which package you go with.
Yes and no. After having used SoFlo’s services, we were generally satisfied, but think improvements could be made. The SAT prep material they use could use a boost in particular.