I started Walker Prep in 2014, and not quite on purpose.
I was working in management at a tutoring center when I was asked to fill in as an SAT Reading & Writing tutor. I hesitated — I had little experience with standardized tests at the time — but I agreed, and I went looking for the best preparation materials I could find.
What I found disappointed me. The strategies on offer were vague and superficial: common-sense advice that could have applied to any test, heavy on what to do and silent on how to do it. The specific tactics weren't there. The concrete methods for actually executing the advice weren't there.
That gap is what built Walker Prep. I began analyzing the tests myself — studying how the questions are constructed, and translating what I found into techniques a student could actually use. Around the same time, I had a young son at home and wanted work that would let me be present for those early years. The two pursuits met, and I struck out on my own as an independent tutor focused on the verbal side of the test.
More than a decade later, that early analytical work has grown into a system. At its center is the Cross-Examiner's Toolbox — a forensic way of reading the test, built on a small set of named techniques that meet each kind of Reading & Writing question on its own terms. These methodologies are supported by my approach to working with students: an iterative cycle of Socratic assessment, targeted study, and deliberate practice, refined over years of one-on-one work with academically ambitious students. Most of the students I work with reach the 90th–99th percentile. But the deeper aim has never been only the score. Done properly, this preparation builds analytical habits — rigorous reading, disciplined reasoning, attention to how language actually works — that outlast the test.
My own background is in philosophy. I hold a B.A. from UCLA, where I developed the analytical instincts that still shape how I teach, and I spent years teaching English — as a tutor at Santa Monica College and UCLA, and as an instructor and Academic Director at one of the largest ESL schools in Los Angeles — before test preparation became my sole focus.
Walker Prep remains a small boutique practice by design. I maintain a limited roster and teach the test myself, and the method is the same whether a student works with me one-on-one or in a group, and whether they start at 550 or 750. The test is the same test; what changes from student to student is where the focus falls.
If you'd like to know more about the method and what it might do for your student, my weekly newsletter, The Score, is the place to start. And if you're ready to begin in earnest, the Diagnostic Review is the first step.