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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Cyndy McDonald, certified educational planner, founder of the Higher Education Consultants Association, instructor in UCLA Extension's College Counseling Cehttps://www.instagram.com/dr_joe_ap_exams/?hl=enrtificate program, and creator of the first college planning software.

Dr. Joe and Cyndy discuss why she describes families and colleges as speaking two different languages and what it takes to translate between them, how she developed her student-first match approach using surveys and self-reflection rather than rankings, why families should begin the conversation as early as sixth grade rather than junior year, what distinguishes a genuinely good educational consultant from a mediocre one and the single question families should use to tell the difference, how overburdened school counselors leave families uninformed and misinformed, and why she considers course rigor the most important thing a ninth or tenth grader can focus on.

This episode is especially useful for first-generation families, parents of younger high schoolers planning ahead, anyone considering hiring a college consultant, and school counselors and independent consultants in the field.

📲 Connect with them: https://www.cyndymcdonald.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CyndyMcDonaldsChannel
Email: [email protected]

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Ann Garcia, certified financial planner, wealth advisor at the Mather Group, and author of How to Pay for College, known to many families as The College Financial Lady.

Dr. Joe and Ann discuss why nearly every family qualifies for some form of aid and how to identify which scholarships a student is actually eligible for, how to read a financial aid award letter and separate genuine grant money from loans and work study repackaged as aid, why families miss Parent PLUS loans buried in their package, how to use the 75th percentile data on collegedata.com to find schools likely to offer merit money, practical ways to start and grow a 529 even on a tight budget, and why she considers chasing prestige at any price one of the most damaging financial decisions American families make.

This episode is especially useful for families earning too much for traditional need-based aid but facing an eighty thousand dollar sticker price, parents of younger children starting to save, and anyone about to compare award letters.

📲 Connect with them: https://howtopayforcollege.com/about
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@howtopayforcollege

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning! 

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Daniel Ryave, founder of SAT Prep Tutor Daniel, who taught high school sophomores in Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer and earned a master's in public policy at Carnegie Mellon before building a following of more than 275,000 students across social platforms.

Dr. Joe and Daniel discuss how the digital SAT's adaptivity works at the module level rather than question by question and why landing in the easier second module limits a student's possible score, how to build an effective study plan using only free resources like Khan Academy and the College Board question bank, why doing 20 to 30 questions a day with careful review beats doing a hundred, how test anxiety tends to affect both the least and most prepared students, why he is strongly opposed to AI-generated practice questions, and what he wishes parents would stop doing.

This episode is especially useful for students starting prep from scratch, families who can't afford expensive programs, and parents who suspect they may be adding to their child's stress.

📲 Connect with them: https://satpreptutordaniel.wordpress.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SATpreptutor
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@satpreptutor

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning! 

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Philip Bates, director of college readiness at UWorld and a former teacher and principal who led elementary, junior high, and high school campuses before moving into educational technology.

Dr. Joe and Philip discuss why taking practice test after practice test is an inefficient way to prepare and what immediate feedback does instead, why roughly half of an AP exam is essay-based and why students consistently overrate their own writing, what genuine classroom rigor looks like compared to simply assigning more content, why executive function skills have to be explicitly taught rather than assumed, how families should evaluate the crowded market of free resources and paid tutoring, and how he coached his own high school senior to a significant SAT improvement using short daily sessions and an error log.

📲 Connect with them: https://www.uworld.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UWorldofficial

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with David Blobaum, co-founder of Summit Prep, board member and director of outreach for the National Test Prep Association, and a University of Chicago honors graduate who turned down a conditional CIA offer to build a test prep company instead.

Dr. Joe and David discuss where test optional admissions actually stands now and why selective schools were never truly optional, how a strong score functions as a merit aid lever at schools further down the rankings, what a University of California report revealed about students with perfect math GPAs placing into remedial math, why grade inflation has left parents without accurate information about their own children's preparation, why the tips-and-tricks promise from large prep companies cannot produce real score gains, and why he argues the goalpost families should care about is success after college rather than admission to it.

This episode is especially useful for parents trying to read past an inflated transcript, families weighing whether to submit scores, and students targeting merit aid rather than just admission.

📲 Connect with them: https://summitprep.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@summitprep6663

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Mike Bergin, president of Chariot Learning, co-founder of the National Test Prep Association, and co-host of the Tests and the Rest podcast, who has spent three decades in test prep including leadership roles at Kaplan and Huntington Learning Center.

Dr. Joe and Mike discuss why the test prep industry had no one speaking for it when test optional admissions took hold and what prompted him to help build a trade association, what the SAT and ACT measure about college readiness that high school grades structurally cannot, why students with excellent math grades are often blindsided by test math, how to choose between the SAT and ACT based on where a student's strengths lie, why a short boot camp is a beginning rather than a plan, and the fifteen minutes of unassigned daily reading he prescribes to every family of a younger teen.

This episode is especially useful for parents of freshmen and sophomores planning ahead, families deciding between the SAT and ACT, and anyone who has been told their child is simply a bad test taker.


📲 Connect with them: https://www.chariotlearning.com/
Free Word of the Day: https://roots2words.com/
Podcast: https://gettestbright.com/tests-and-the-rest/

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Steve Kirshenbaum, CEO of SAT Preparation Group, a one-on-one test prep practice in Miami that he has run for 25 years after coming to education from a corporate engineering career.

Dr. Joe and Steve discuss why he believes group prep produces poor results and what he saw working inside those programs before starting his own, the single question he tells parents to ask any tutor or company before hiring them, how he reduced the tested grammar rules to a short list, what a real diagnostic reveals about how a student reads and works through math, why superscoring means planning for several test dates rather than one, and why he treats test anxiety as a gap in training rather than a fixed trait.

This episode is especially useful for parents comparing tutors and prep companies, students who freeze on test day despite knowing the material, and families deciding when in the year to prepare.

📲 Connect with them: [email protected]
Website: https://satprepgroup.com
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SATPrepGroup

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning! 

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Jean Burk, founder of College Prep Genius, who has spent more than 20 years teaching families to approach standardized tests as logic puzzles rather than content exams.

Dr. Joe and Jean discuss how she went from homeschooling on one income with nothing saved for college to watching National Merit offers fill her mailbox, why the PSAT deserves far more attention than families give it and what the P actually stands for, the scholarship economics behind why colleges are willing to pay for high scores, what sophomores should be doing in the six months before the test, how she coaches students through test anxiety by treating it as unfamiliarity, and why the valedictorians who call her are so often the ones who struggled most.

This episode is especially useful for parents of sophomores, homeschooling families, students hoping to reduce college costs through merit aid, and anyone who assumed the PSAT was just a practice run.

📲 Connect with them: [email protected]
Website: https://collegeprepgenius.com

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning! 

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Mobin Naybin, a computer engineer turned test prep specialist and founder of DSAT Hackers, a platform built entirely around the digital SAT.

Dr. Joe and Mobin Naybin discuss what "hacking" the SAT means in practice and why it comes down to pattern recognition rather than gimmicks, why students should never deliberately underperform in the first module and how a careless early miss can cost more than a hard question, how to tell which math problems the built-in Desmos calculator actually speeds up and which ones it slows down, the mistake-tracking system he uses so students stop repeating the same errors across practice tests, and the situations where he tells families his program isn't the right fit and refunds them.

This episode is especially useful for students already scoring in the 1300s who want to push higher, families comparing digital SAT prep options, and anyone whose practice test scores have stopped improving.

📲 Connect with them: https://dsathackers.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mobinsatprep/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dsathackers

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning! 

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In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe sits down with Brian Stewart, Princeton graduate, perfect SAT scorer, bestselling author of Barron's SAT, ACT, and PSAT prep books, and founder of BWS Education Consulting, to talk about what actually changed with the digital SAT and what actually moves a score.

Dr. Joe and Brian discuss why the digital SAT's much shorter reading passages are not an easier test, how the section-adaptive format works and why students need to treat every first-module question as consequential, why he tells families there are no real hacks and what he teaches instead, how prep should change for students with IEPs, 504 plans, extended time, and test anxiety, when a twenty dollar book is genuinely enough, and why a 4.0 GPA is no longer a reliable predictor of a strong test score.

This episode is especially useful for parents of juniors preparing for the digital SAT, families navigating testing accommodations, students deciding between the SAT and ACT, and anyone trying to prep well without spending thousands.

📲 Connect with them: https://freetestprep.com/
https://bwseducationconsulting.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrianStewartBarrons/videos

📲 Learn more about us: https://supportedtutoring.com/
Facebook: Dr. Joe
Instagram: @dr_joe_ap_exams 

Thanks for tuning in to the SupportED Learning Podcast with Dr. Joe. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more insights on education, critical thinking, and AI integration in learning. Visit our website at supportedtutoring.com

Remember to share this podcast with fellow parents and educators who are passionate about reimagining education for tomorrow's world. Until next time, keep supporting learning!