Questions and Answers

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Trial Session

You may schedule a trial session by clicking on the Trial Session Button at the top right of the screen or  clicking the button below.

For information on what will be covered at the trial session, please visit our Trial Session page.

You may schedule your next session by contacting your tutor directly.

Scheduling and Locations

Sessions are available from 9am-10pm, 7 days per week.

The minimum session length for reading intervention is 60 minutes. The minimum session length for all other services is 90 minutes per tutoring session. Families with multiple students in a single household may split the session time among siblings to reach the 90-minute minimum.

Denver Test Prep is typically able to provide in-home tutoring throughout the Denver and Boulder metro areas. This includes but is not limited to the following cities and locations: Arvada, Aurora, Boulder, Broomfield, Centennial, Cherry Creek, Cherry Hills, Denver, Englewood, Golden, Greenwood Village, Highlands Ranch, Littleton, Lone Tree, Longmont, Louisville, Parker, Superior, and Westminster. We also regularly work with families that live in cities outside of our primary service area such as Castle Rock and Evergreen. For these students, we typically arrange for sessions at a library or another quiet location that is a short commute from home.

DTP offers online tutoring throughout the US and internationally. For online tutoring, we utilize digital whiteboards and screen sharing technology to ensure that students are able to get the full tutoring experience while working remotely.

Sessions are held in your home, at our office, or in a quiet location in your neighborhood, such as a library or coffee shop.

Yes! We have space for tutoring at our office in the Denver Tech Center.

Services and Approach

One of the key benefits of one-on-one tutoring is that each lesson is customized to meet your specific needs at that point in time. This means that no two students will have the exact same experience and no two lessons will be exactly alike. The best way to get an idea of what tutoring sessions will be like is to try us out by signing up for a Trial Session. That being said, a “typical” session usually begins with a review of the homework assigned in the previous lesson, before moving on to modeling of new techniques and problem types by the tutor. The student is then expected to apply the new techniques to questions with the help of the tutor and to gain further practice through the completion of problem sets assigned for homework.

The amount of homework required between sessions will depend on the type and length of your tutoring program.

  1. Standardized Test Prep: Students are expected to spend a significant amount of time completing practice tests and problem sets between tutoring sessions. Homework is an essential part of mastering the techniques necessary for success on these exams and helps to ensure that tutoring sessions will be as productive as possible. The exact amount of homework assigned will be determined jointly by you and your tutor based on the amount of time you have to prepare for your test, how quickly you are progressing, and how far along you are in the test preparation process before you begin your tutoring program. The number of hours varies widely, but an average amount of homework is roughly 3-5 hours per week.
  2. Academic Tutoring: The amount of homework will largely be determined by the teacher at your school. However, additional homework may be assigned by your tutor to supplement your school work in areas where additional practice is needed.

The number of tutoring sessions required varies greatly from student to student. This is based on a wide range of factors, including how much prep work the student has done before starting with us, the amount of homework the student elects to complete between tutoring sessions, and the student’s natural abilities on the test in question. For more information on pricing and our 3-session minimum, please visit our pricing page.

While our students consistently achieve significant score increases through our tutoring programs, how much your score will improve depends on a wide variety of factors particular to your situation. We are 100% confident that we can help you to achieve your best score if you are willing to put in the effort, but it would be dishonest to promise you a specific score increase up front. We encourage you to experience first-hand what we have to offer by signing up for a Trial Session.

Denver Test Prep offers small group lessons to siblings or friends preparing for the same exam at a discounted rate. However, we do not organize small group lessons for students. Groups must be formed by parents or students themselves. To learn more about small group tutoring, please contact us or visit our pricing page.

Denver Test Prep only offers large group classes (more than 5 students) to non-profit organizations. These classes are not available to individual students. If you are a non-profit organization interested in establishing a test prep or tutoring program for your students, please visit our Partners page, view the Partners section of our FAQ, or contact us to learn more.

Yes! Denver Test Prep can help you to plan, write, and/or review your admissions essays. Please see our Admissions Essay Writing and Review page for details.

While we are experts in supporting students with writing admissions essays, we do not offer full admissions consulting or college selection services. Please contact us if you would like recommendations for external partners that are experts in this space.

We are able to provide academic tutoring for students as early as kindergarten. The youngest students we work with for standardized tests are preparing for the ISEE and SSAT Lower Level Exams. The ISEE Lower Level Exam is first offered to students currently in the 4th grade and the SSAT Lower Level Exam is first offered to students currently in the 5th grade. For more information on these exams and other tests, please visit our test specific pages which can be accessed through our Services page.

Materials

Denver Test Prep uses a variety of materials in tutoring sessions. For standardized tests there is a strong focus on using actual problems from previous exams that have been released by the test makers. Your tutor will work with you to determine which materials are most appropriate for your situation at the trial session and will provide additional materials as needed throughout your tutoring program.

The cost of materials is included in the price of tutoring sessions for standardized test prep. Materials used for academic tutoring must be purchased by the student’s family.

Yes. While we have taken great care to select the best tutoring materials available on the market for our tutoring sessions, we recognize that situations may arise where students would prefer to supplement these materials with other books they have purchased. This most often occurs with students that have decided to work with one of our tutors during or after a test prep course with another company.

Tutor Qualifications and Matching Process

At Denver Test Prep, we have a rigorous screening process when selecting our tutors. Historically, we have hired only 10% of applicants who met the following minimum requirements:

  1. Test score in the top 2% of test takers on an official exam or comparable official exam for any test they wish to teach
  2. Graduate of a highly selective college or university.
  3. Minimum of 2 years teaching and/or tutoring experience
  4. No criminal history, verified by an official background check

Schedule: Our aim is to ensure that you will be able to work with a single tutor for the duration of your tutoring program. While you may choose to vary the days and times of your lessons each week, your expected schedule is an important factor in the matching process.

Special Needs: For students with learning disabilities or other special needs, we do our best to match them with tutors who have had formal training and/or experience working with similar students in the past.

Personality: Students and tutors spend a great deal of time together, so it is important that they get along! While we take personality factors into account with all of our students, we have found this to be particularly important for younger students. Is your son or daughter an athlete, musician, or aspiring world traveler? In addition to being great teachers, our tutors are an exceptionally well-rounded group of individuals with a diverse set of backgrounds and interests. We do our best to pair each student with a tutor who shares their interests and has a teaching style that is right for them.

Requests for a specific tutor: New students that have been referred to us by a friend, family member, or other acquaintance frequently request a specific tutor by name. We do our best to accommodate these requests if the tutor is available and is the right fit for your situation.

Due to our careful matching process, we rarely receive requests from students to switch tutors. However, students are permitted to request a new tutor if they are dissatisfied with their current tutor for any reason.

Pricing and Billing Information

Information on billing rates can be found on our pricing page

Families must commit to a minimum of three tutoring sessions. Please note that the majority of standardized test prep students will require more than the minimum number of sessions to achieve a significant score improvement across multiple sections. Three session test prep programs are only recommended for students who are strong test takers, have completed a significant amount of prep before starting with DTP, only require a small score improvement, and/or want to focus on a specific portion of the test. Mastering standardized tests requires students to apply a range of techniques under significant time pressure. An important part of achieving mastery is the growth that comes from completing multiple timed practice sections from practice tests outside of tutoring sessions and reviewing these with a tutor to fine-tune techniques and fill content gaps. As a result, the students achieving significant score increases typically complete 5-8 tutoring sessions.

Maybe. The hourly rate for group courses offered by large test prep companies will likely be cheaper than private tutoring with Denver Test Prep. However, private tutoring is a more effective and efficient way to prepare for the exam and may require far fewer total hours. Students consistently find that private tutoring is a far better value than a course, due to the higher quality of instruction and increased control over the number and content of lessons.

Students will receive invoices on a monthly basis.

Students may pay for tutoring sessions in the following ways:

  1. Online using a debit or credit card (preferred method of payment). Client payment information is securely encrypted and stored.
  2. A personal check or money order with the payment made out to Denver Test Prep. Please note that check payments must be submitted in advance of upcoming tutoring sessions.

Denver Test Prep does not offer tutoring packages or bulk discounts.

If a session must be cancelled for any reason, Denver Test Prep asks that students provide their tutor with as much notice as reasonably possible. Clients who cancel 2 to 24 hours in advance of a scheduled tutoring session will be billed for one hour of tutoring. Clients who cancel within 2 hours of a scheduled session or do not show up for a scheduled session will be billed for the full scheduled time.

Partners

Denver Test Prep is committed to offering customized one-on-one tutoring programs and test prep courses to non-profit organizations at greatly reduced rates. To learn more about program offerings and rates for non-profits, please visit our Partners page or contact us.

Our organization has a strong track record of helping students from our non-profit partners to achieve significant score increases. For examples of successful programs, please take a look at our Partners page.

Yes! In addition to our non-profit programs, Denver Test Prep greatly values its strategic partnerships with sports teams, arts programs, professional associations, and other organizations that work closely with current or prospective students. If you are interested in partnering with Denver Test Prep, please contact us to let us know more about your organization and how we might be able to work together.

Parents and Legal Guardians

Yes. Parents and legal guardians are welcome to observe or even participate in tutoring sessions. However, we encourage you to thoughtfully consider what will be most effective for the student when making your decision about how involved to be in your child’s tutoring program. Teenagers and many other students have historically performed better when they take ownership over their own tutoring program and have some control over scheduling and homework assignments. That being said, you know your child best and should work with them to figure out what role is best for your particular situation.

At Denver Test Prep, we strive to form lasting relationships with our students and their families. We recognize that purchasing private tutoring for multiple children can be an expensive proposition and that family dynamics can at times make the tutoring relationship more complex. To ensure that our families are well taken care of and each student receives the personal attention they deserve, we offer the following:

  1. Shared Time: Families with multiple students in a single household may split the session time among siblings to reach the 90-minute minimum.
  2. Tutor Matching: When working with families our priority is to make sure that each individual student is matched with the tutor that is right for them. Often times this means that you will have different tutors assigned to each of your children. In some situations, you may have the opportunity to have a single tutor work with multiple children. We will inform you during the matching process if we have a tutor available that we feel is qualified to work with more than one of your children. You will then have the opportunity to decide whether you prefer a single tutor or multiple tutors for your family.
  1. For billing questions, please contact us via email at info@denvertestprep.com.
  2. For all other questions and concerns, we encourage you to reach out to the tutor working with your child. Our tutors want to hear from you and depend on you to communicate with them regularly regarding the tutoring program and other aspects of your child’s life that may impact their studies. However, if you would prefer not to speak with the tutor directly for any reason, you should always feel comfortable contacting our management team directly using the email or phone number provided in your introductory email.

Working for Denver Test Prep

Applicants for tutoring positions must meet the following minimum requirements:

  1. Test score in the top 2% of test takers on an official test administration for any standardized test they wish to teach
  2. Graduate of highly selective college or university.
  3. Minimum of 2 years teaching and/or tutoring experience
  4. No criminal history, as verified by an official background check

To apply for a tutoring position, please submit the following via email to info@denvertestprep.com:

  1. Resume
  2. Short cover letter
  3. List of relevant exams and scores
  4. Information regarding your availability (days, times, start date, total hours per week, and geographic areas you are willing to cover)

Additional Questions

You may contact Denver Test Prep by filling out the form on our Contact Us page, emailing us at info@denvertestprep.com, or calling us at (303) 551-0106.

Maybe. Please contact us to tell us a bit more about what you are looking for and we’ll let you know whether or not we can be of assistance.

Denver LSAT, Denver GMAT, and Denver GRE are simply the brand names for the tutoring services offered by Denver Test Prep for the LSAT, GMAT, and GRE. No matter which test you are preparing for, you’ll still get the same high quality service and work with the same dedicated team at Denver Test Prep.

The Denver Test Prep Resources page provides parents and students with a wide range of articles focused on study strategies, test taking techniques, test dates, academic coaching tips, and other topics.