At Tutoring by Christine, TACHS class sizes are capped at twelve students, allowing students to ask questions and to get one-on-one support from expert instructors; hours range from 20 to 30 of intensive training and consist of two to three full length practice tests (depending upon session chosen). Students will be taught with a variety of materials, all of which will be supplied to them.

Students enrolled in our test prep program will receive intensive training to successfully complete all parts of the exam. Not only will students review tactics and content in reading, written expression, mathematics, and general reasoning, but students will receive instructions and practice in time management strategies. This is critical as many of the tests that students take in traditional schools are no longer timed, and students are often lacking in this area because of this. Students will take a minimum of two, timed full-length practice tests as well as weekly math quizzes.

Each year we train over one hundred students for the TACHS exam. We are skilled to prepare all students: remedial students who may or may not have an IEP, general education students, and advanced students. We pride ourselves on the individual attention we give to ensure that each and every student is well prepared to achieve the goal of being offered a seat in the Catholic High School of his or her choice.

Students have received acceptances and scholarships to Catholic High Schools on Staten Island and Brooklyn. Most recently, 100% of students were offered seats in Catholic High Schools for the 2018-2019 school year. Part of Christine’s success is that her first three years as a teacher was spent in the Catholic School system. In fact, it was then that she first began prepping students for the TACHS test.

The reading component of the course will include both informational and literary prose with questions that prepare students to answer questions in factual, interpretative, and evaluative comprehension. They will be given strategies and practice to answer questions about main idea, author’s purpose, the meaning of a word in context, and other types of comprehension questions.

The written expression of the TACHS test requires that students choose the most appropriate way to express the ideas in a piece of writing. Questions may address organization, sentence structure, clarity, and effective or appropriateness of expression. Other questions ask students to identify the line of text that contains an error. The course will cover the fundamental grammar and written expression content that is often not taught in traditional school and that is needed to achieve success on this section.

Questions on the mathematics test are drawn from the areas of number sense and operations, algebraic patterns and connections, data analysis/probability/statistics, geometry, and measurement. Students will review 6-8th grade math content that is tested on this section and will receive intensive timed practice. Students are not allowed to use a calculator during the TACHS exam, which often presents a challenge, as most math classes allow calculators to do computations. Students will be given strategies and practice to become comfortable completing math problems without the use of a calculator.

Finally, the TACHS test contains an ability section with questions designed to assess students’ abilities to reason with somewhat more novel questions that use spatial and figural content. The questions show how well students use their reasoning skills to solve problems they may or may not have been directly taught. Students will be introduced to and given strategies and practice to successfully answer different types of ability questions.