Taking standardized college admittance tests—for example, the SAT—can be intimidating and stressful. The pressure is even higher with graduate school tests such as the MCAT (medical school) and the LSAT (law school). The best way to prepare, of course, is to study. Students who feel they need more preparation can easily find courses specifically prepared to help them pass the test, either in person or on-line. William van der Sluys, assistant teaching professor of chemistry at Penn State Altoona, started out 15 years ago as an MCAT tutor and eventually was asked by a test prep company to write text for the MCAT test.
After his postdoc at Los Alamos, van der Sluys taught at the University of Montana before moving to State College. While teaching high school chemistry and physics, he began looking for other professional opportunities and found that a new company was looking for MCAT tutors. “When I started interacting with the Next Step company, they were very new, very small.” He began doing online tutoring for the MCAT. “These were one-on-one online sessions, with kids from South Carolina to Alaska. It was a wonderful experience. The kids are highly motivated. They work very, very hard.”
Van der Sluys understands that this type of tutoring is about more than just remembering facts. It’s his job to “get them focused and teach them how to deal with standardized tests.” The timing and style of teaching differs from his work in the classroom at Penn State Altoona. “What I do online is Skype. I can look my students in the eye. We use Whiteboard. We both can see it, we both can annotate. It’s basically doing it on a whiteboard. It’s fabulous.” He likes the one-on-one this method provides. “I wouldn’t want to do it with a bunch of students. Just like any other educational tool, you just have to know when to apply it.”
After he had a few years of online tutoring experience, van der Sluys expanded his work and began writing passages for the MCAT. “They were looking for someone to write text. The MCAT is a series of passages and you have to answer the questions based on what you read. A passage is 2-3 paragraphs, with some data and a figure or table that they would have to use to answer the questions. I took a lot of my personal educational experiences and wrote some passages.” Since then he’s been writing for the MCAT regularly. He even takes the test occasionally to familiarize himself with it.
Topics for his writing are based on his own expertise. When the MCAT was revised four years ago, “as part of that revision they gave us a list of possible topics. From that I could select what I wanted to write about.” A specific requirement concerns how math is presented. He explains, “MCAT doesn’t allow calculators. I have to write questions where the math is manageable from a mental standpoint. They have to make logical guesses based on what they remember.”
Three years ago, van der Sluys came to Penn State Altoona to teach chemistry and work on research projects in the Materials Characterization lab, a move he was very happy to make. “I’ve got the best of both worlds—teaching at a small campus and yet all the research tools.”
In addition to teaching and doing research at Penn State Altoona, and tutoring for the MCAT prep, Van der Sluys teaches a two-weekend SAT prep course for the Commission on Economic Opportunity at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre. Van der Sluys “Students from every school district in northeastern Pennsylvania who are on a free or reduced lunch program can come to this course for free,” he says. The recent headlines about cheating on college admission tests become even more meaningful for the students who take his course. “They have worked hard to get ahead and don’t have all the resources necessary to buy their way into college. If they do well enough on the real SAT, they can go anywhere. It’s one of the most rewarding things I do.”
—Therese Boyd, ’79