Our Methods Make Our Program Extraordinary
Students come to the Socratic Summer Academy at Colgate University not just to learn, but to be part of a vibrant camp community that nurtures their passions and helps them overcome their individual academic challenges and prepare for their future.
How do we achieve our results?
Unparalleled Curriculum Backed By Research
Our team of staff and administrators ensures our curricula, program design, and teacher training remain unmatched. Our founder, Max Rosen, created SSA after years of working as a teacher and camp administrator; he later went on to graduate from Harvard Law School as the valedictorian of his class. SSA's executive director and co-founder, Alyssa Bowlby, also co-founded a non-profit - the Yleana Leadership Foundation, which works with low-income students from Boston, Baltimore, NYC, and Philadelphia each summer to help them improve their SATⓇ scores and get scholarships to competitive colleges.
Alyssa, the Executive Director, has been teaching the SATⓇ exam since 2006 and the ACTⓇ exam since 2008. She and Curriculum Director Garrett Barnes take a hands-on approach to curriculum, teaching, writing, and refactoring until they are satisfied that it passes the gold standard: it makes sense to a student who is struggling to understand.
Besides having a dedicated Curriculum Director, we refine our curriculum each year, spending thousands of hours researching and testing new strategies to make our program as effective as possible. Our staff takes the SATⓇ exam as many times per year as adults are allowed to (currently three - March, May, and October), which enables our curriculum to change in response to new patterns we observe on the test.
Finally, students take the SATⓇ five times over the course of their three weeks at Socratic Summer Academy - because nothing prepares you for the test like actually taking the test.
“I’ve been to places for church, sports, and music. [Of all of them,] SSA was the best one I’ve been to.”
— Danny H., 2012 Student
Send your students to Socratic Summer Academy and rest assured that they receive the most updated strategies
We run in-school SAT classes during the year at high schools. These classes allow us to innovate a curricular response to students' evolving needs, new patterns we've observed in students' retention, understanding, and linking of new information to previous information, and updates in the way concepts are being tested on the SATⓇ exam.
We guarantee students are receiving content which is not only the most updated according to the test but also the most optimized according to learning needs.
