The Advanced Course

The Advanced Course is Walker Prep's most sustained one-on-one engagement in SAT Reading & Writing. Across twenty-four sessions with Dave Walker, the course develops mastery of every major question type on the section, extending the Comprehensive Course's method in the two directions the highest scores require: deeper grounding in grammar fundamentals, and advanced treatment of the question types where the highest-scoring students distinguish themselves.

The engagement is calibrated for the student whose target sits in the 700–800 range. What separates the 90th percentile from the 99th is how often the section's hardest questions are answered correctly: the closer the target moves toward 800, the fewer of them the student can afford to miss. And the College Board's most challenging and novel constructions are concentrated in exactly those questions — the Inference questions that ask the student to track multiple paired correlations across a highly dense passage, the Command of Evidence questions whose correct answer supports the claim obliquely (as a necessary background condition, for instance) rather than directly, and the categories where the wrong-answer patterns are most carefully constructed to invite the plausible-sounding subjective response. The Advanced Course exists for that work.

The Advanced Course is the right engagement when the target is 700–800 — when the student is aiming at admission to the most selective universities, and the Reading & Writing section needs to close all the way to the ceiling. Students aiming at the 650–690 range are usually better served by the Comprehensive Course, whose shorter length is calibrated to the work that band requires.

A note on the student who has plateaued in the low 700s. Parents of such students sometimes ask why an engagement should spend hours on question types their student has, in some sense, already mastered. The question deserves a precise answer: a 720 student is proficient in the general sense — strong raw skills, a well-developed intuition for the language — but is usually not proficient strategically. Most arrive carrying a set of conventional-wisdom strategies, widely circulated and rarely scrutinized, that actively hamper progress. Intuition and raw skill are what carried them to 720. Past that point, intuition works against the student twice over: a usually reliable feel for the language is no longer reliable enough to fuel further gains, and the College Board is adept at crafting wrong answers that appeal most strongly to intuition operating without a precise method. Together with flawed technique, this is what leaves the score stuck.

What remains to be built is a thorough understanding of how the questions are designed: why right answers are right and wrong answers are wrong, which specific skills each question tests, where the traps lie. From that understanding, the student proceeds by analysis rather than intuition. An analytical method cannot be appended to an intuitive base and reserved for the hardest questions; it must be built from the ground up. The Advanced Course's instructional hours assume a student who already commands a strong general foundation; they reflect how long the conversion from intuition to analytical method typically takes, not how long it takes to teach the basics.

The Advanced Course also carries deeper grammar work, and the reason is worth stating precisely. Most students — including high-achieving students at strong schools — arrive with gaps in grammar fundamentals, which is why both engagements include foundational grammar instruction. The Advanced Course includes more, because a 700–800 target leaves no room for misses on Standard English Conventions, and consistently solving those questions without misses and with maximum speed means solving them from grammatical foundation rather than from intuition. The speed matters beyond Conventions itself: time banked there funds the section's densest reading, so optimizing these questions is as much a matter of time management as of the points themselves.

As with the Comprehensive Course, the Advanced Course assumes a student who will complete rigorous homework as assigned, engage substantively with the material rather than skimming it, and commit to the method. The commitment is not incidental: the method will conflict, at points, with the conventional approaches the student has likely absorbed, and unlearning flawed strategy is part of the work. The principle is simple: no improved technique, no improved outcome.

Most families are best served by beginning with the Diagnostic Review before securing the engagement. The Diagnostic is the most direct way to gauge fit on both sides: parents are welcome in the session and receive a full recording, and Dave begins teaching strategy in the session itself, so families see the method at work before committing. Dave will make a specific recommendation for the engagement best suited to the student's target and timeline, and the engagement itself begins with the roadmap already in hand from the first session. The full Diagnostic Review fee is credited toward any engagement booked within 30 days.

Representative instructional-hour distributions. The table below shows a representative allocation of in-session instructional time across each engagement. These are examples only — actual allocations vary with the student's strengths and focus areas. Instructional hours comprise both direct instruction and guided practice.

A diagnostic starting point. Families who completed the Diagnostic Review — Walker Prep's standalone diagnostic service — begin instruction immediately, with the written diagnostic and preparation roadmap guiding the engagement from the first session. For families who did not, the first session is largely dedicated to diagnostic work: identifying strengths, weaknesses, and priorities, and setting the engagement's general trajectory, with the resulting roadmap folded into the first lesson summary. In either case, the priorities give particular weight to the categories where the student's target requires the deepest additional work.

Twenty-four one-on-one sessions with Dave. Each session runs 60–75 minutes, taught by Dave directly, live on Zoom. Every session applies the Socratic method that anchors all Walker Prep instruction — review of missed and low-confidence questions, guided strategy application, and the iterative cycle of targeted study and deliberate practice the approach depends on.

Deeper grounding in grammar fundamentals. Beyond the strategic treatment of the Standard English Conventions question types, the work includes deeper treatment of the foundations on which the tested concepts rest: the parts of speech, sentence structure, and the analytical vocabulary required to reason about them precisely under time pressure.

Advanced treatment of the most challenging question types. The additional sessions accommodate deeper work in the categories where 700-and-above students distinguish themselves — Inference and Command of Evidence questions in their most demanding constructions, the passage types where the College Board's most novel patterns appear, and the nuances of the test's most tempting traps.

Full access to the Mastery Course. Walker Prep's complete curriculum in SAT Reading & Writing — the same curriculum that anchors all Walker Prep instruction — is available to the student throughout the engagement, on the Walker Prep student platform. The Cross-Examiner's Toolbox™, Walker Prep's system of analytical techniques for the Core Reading question types, is at the center of it.

Full access to the Word List and the Casebook. The Word List, Walker Prep's SAT vocabulary application, and the Casebook, the practice and analytics platform, are available to the student throughout the engagement.

Rigorous homework, prescribed session by session. Each assignment is a prescription rather than a predetermined packet: a considered set of next steps calibrated to what the most recent session revealed. The assignments specify not only what to work on but how — each carries detailed instructions for executing the assigned material. The engagement follows an overall trajectory set by the scope of the Reading & Writing section and the priorities established in the opening diagnostic work, but the trajectory is a guideline, not a script; homework is both proactive and responsive to what is happening in the moment.

Expect 1.5 to 2 hours of work between sessions — and expect homework to mean more than practice questions: assignments combine study (reading, taking notes on step-by-step procedures, and retrieval practice such as self-quizzing) with the practice that applies it. Assignments are posted to the student's one-on-one tutoring space on the Walker Prep student platform and draw on Walker Prep's bank of official SAT practice material.

A detailed written lesson summary after every session. Dave writes a substantive summary after each session — the specific gaps the session surfaced, the strategies covered, the homework assigned, and the priorities for next time. The summaries are Walker Prep's primary channel of communication with parents: every observation Dave has about strengths, weaknesses, emerging patterns, progress, and concerns appears there, unabridged. Nothing is held back for private conversation. Parents with a question the summaries haven't addressed are always welcome to ask.

A recording of every session. All sessions are recorded, and links to the recordings are posted to the student's one-on-one tutoring space on the Walker Prep student platform. Recordings remain available until 30 days after the test administration date.

Many parents arrive convinced that score improvement is a function of practice volume — that the students who improve are the ones who complete the most questions, and that a stalled score means the volume was too low or the right practice sets were never found. This conviction often survives a failed attempt at exactly that approach. Some families accordingly expect Walker Prep's results to rest on a more intense practice regime, or on access to practice material with special potency. Neither is true, nor ever has been. And the misconception matters: for a plateaued student, high-volume practice does not merely fail to produce improvement — it further ingrains the very habits holding the score in place.

What has distinguished every significant improvement Walker Prep students have achieved is not volume but method. The work begins with learning new techniques — literally memorizing their strategies — and then painstakingly applying them to questions. This is deliberate practice, and it is the cornerstone of the practice's results. It means lower volume and slower work, particularly early in the engagement. A student newly working from method stumbles in application: a step is forgotten and must be looked up; a technique's name turns out to be clearer in memory than its substance; the way a step applies to the question at hand is not immediately apparent. This form of practice is halting, fraught with tangents, and resistant to rhythm.

Families should know in advance what this looks and feels like. Deliberate practice requires analytical intensity and meticulous procedure. It withdraws the student from the comfortable exercise of existing habits and places them exactly where their lack of strategic mastery can be felt — which means it often feels, from the inside, like little progress is being made. From the outside it can look the same way: there is no tall stack of completed questions to point to at the end of a practice session. These are the well-documented signatures of deliberate practice, and they mean the opposite of what they appear to mean. They are what actual progress looks like.

The balance does shift. Once the techniques have been learned and the student has worked through the early stages of application, the work turns to internalizing and habituating them — and that phase is increasingly about repetition. The shift is most conspicuous in the final quarter of the engagement; it has almost no place in the first quarter or half. How soon it arrives depends chiefly on how quickly the student learns the techniques, which is one reason self-assigned practice outside the homework is discouraged during the learning phase, when high-volume repetition rehearses precisely the habits being replaced.

Walker Prep is honest about what the work requires, because the honesty is part of what makes the engagement succeed. This is especially true of the Advanced Course, whose target sits at the top of the scoring range and whose success depends on the student's full participation in the work between sessions.

Homework is required, not optional — and homework includes study material, not just practice. The strategies Walker Prep teaches must be internalized, not merely read over. Students should expect to be quizzed on the assigned study material at the start of each session. The engagement's outcome depends on the between-session work as much as it depends on the sessions themselves — and this is more true, not less, at the Advanced Course's target range, where the marginal points come from the disciplined application of internalized method.

Meaningful engagement with the material is required. The homework must be done as prescribed, including distributing it over time rather than compressing it into the hours before the next session. Persistent last-minute completion produces shallow retention and may lead Walker Prep to end the engagement.

Twice-weekly sessions are encouraged; once-weekly also works. The twice-weekly cadence typically produces superior results — the shorter interval keeps the work continuous and the feedback loop tight — and families whose schedules can support it are encouraged to choose it. But during the school year, twice weekly is simply not possible for many busy students, and once-weekly sessions paired with consistent completion of homework as assigned can and regularly do produce excellent results. Sessions more frequent than twice weekly are generally not advised: with too little time between sessions, the assigned study and practice cannot do their work. Note that the Advanced Course's twenty-four sessions require an early enough start for the chosen cadence to fit ahead of the target administration.

No concurrent programs. Walker Prep asks that families refrain from engaging other SAT Reading & Writing tutors, courses, or preparation programs during the engagement. Preparation approaches vary significantly, and concurrent programs inevitably pull students in conflicting directions. The same caution applies to self-assigned practice volume beyond the homework: during the learning phase, unassigned high-volume practice rehearses the very habits the method is replacing (see Section 05). Discovery of a concurrent program may lead Walker Prep to end the engagement.

Consistent cadence, without gaps. Gaps are discouraged throughout the engagement, not only before test day. A single week off, once or twice, does no real damage; longer gaps typically produce not a pause in progress but regression. Students get rusty very quickly — which is also why the engagement is designed to run all the way through the week of the target administration, with no significant gap between the last session and test day.

Operational policies — cancellations, reschedules, rescheduling procedure, scheduling recommendations — appear in the frequently asked questions below.

The calendar below reflects Dave's current session availability. Booking access is granted immediately upon purchase; the calendar is provided here so families can confirm that Dave's availability aligns with their schedule before committing. Note that availability shifts continuously as other families book. Families should check the calendar at the time of purchase.

Dave's schedule fills as national SAT administrations approach. Families who have reserved a cohort are strongly encouraged to schedule all sessions as soon as the engagement is secured; availability cannot be guaranteed for delayed scheduling. The Advanced Course’s twenty-four-session count makes early scheduling particularly consequential — the schedule must accommodate the full session load before the target administration.