Harvey Manger-Weil has launched several successful careers but his most enduring legacy will likely be his role as “The. College Wizard” because he’s spent three decades training students to excel at the SAT and get into the colleges of. Their choice.
A high SAT score isn’t about how smart you are; it’s about how motivated and persistent you are, and whether you have the ability to delay gratification. Harvey Manger-Weil
Manger-Weil, a successful entrepreneur, has tutored students to conquer this ‘make or break’ exam ever since he was a. College student. Now, thanks to technology, his business is nationwide as he uses SKYPE to tutor students face-to-face.
“I started out tutoring as a way of making some extra money while at Dartmouth. I had scored nearly perfectly on my own SAT and I had already begun decoding the SAT system,” said Manger-Weil. Now 55, he spent the next three decades launching one extremely successful business after another, but his SAT tutoring business. Remains a constant.
He believes his skill at beating the SAT springs from his ability to think “outside the box,” which is also. How he succeeds as an entrepreneur. “I credit my success in teaching the SAT to the fact that I’m a non-educator,” he says.
Indeed, linear thinking was never part of his toolbox. All I ever heard from my parents was ‘Make sure you have a job to support yourself,’ but it was. Just my bent to look at things differently.”
In fact, Manger-Weil said he “struggled with rules because I saw them as obstacles preventing me from succeeding as. High and fast as I could.” The result?
The SAT exam dates back to 1926, when a Princeton professor adapted a U.S.
Manger-Weil credits his success to years spent reverse engineering the SAT in order to unlock its intrinsic nature as well as perfect methods of quickly communicating strategies of beating the SAT to his students.
He is also a keen motivator, showing students that the difference between doing well on the test and excelling at it is within their grasp. “A full 20 percent of my students break 2300 (out of a total 2400). The reason that’s so important is that if you do that, you can get into pretty much any school that you want,” he said. But, he warns, “If you only break 2100, that puts you in a much larger group of 25,000-30,000 students, so your choices will be far fewer,” he noted. “The difference between scoring 2100 and 2300 is only 11 questions, so your whole future is determined by only 11 questions,” he added.
This includes inventing one-of-a-kind extracurricular projects for students to complete as well as selecting unique college essay topics to make the entire application stand out. “I don’t just help kids with SATs, I give them a roadmap for marketing themselves over every other student so they can get into places like Stanford, Yale and Harvard. It’s a free service I offer to anyone who signs up to work with me,” he said.
Manger-Weil also works with parents to create an atmosphere that motivates students to achieve success. As he puts it, “My goal is to help my students in any way I can to be happy and successful in their lives.”
By Charlotte Libov