Your Ticket to College in Oakdale Teaches Success

Stick with me here:

When the positive integer K is divided by 7, the remainder is 6. What is the remainder when K+2 is divided by 7?

Do you know the answer? Do you know how you’d come up with the answer?

Adam Leiser does.

In the past eight years, he says he’s helped 1,000 people – or more – learn how to come up with the right answer in the minimum amount of time - no calculators involved.

Leiser, one of the founding partners of Your Ticket to College, says that most math teachers would cringe at the way his group teaches. And for Leiser, that’s OK.

When he tutors a student who’s going to take a standardized test, he says, “My job is to show that student how to get the right answer as quickly as possible.”

Part of the reason for the success of the venture, Leiser says, is his experience.

“I know the test better than anyone you will ever meet,” he says.

Leiser grew up in Old Lyme, for the most part. He went to Dickinson College, taught high school history, economics and special ed; earned his master’s degree in sports management, and began a career as a basketball coach at UConn-Avery Point, and then Assumption College, and then Southern Connecticut State.

And then he decided he didn’t want to coach any more.

“I was in a good spot,” he says. “I had made it, and once I’d made it, I realized it wasn’t a lifestyle I wanted.”

The emphasis in that sentence is on “lifestyle.”

He was traveling all the time and working all the time, and his own life was slipping by, he says. He has a wife and a child, and he wanted to build a family. And that meant spending time with them.

“This is great,” he says of Your Ticket to College. “I see my wife more, I see my kid more.”

For the most part, Leiser works at home. For the most part, his work is one-on-one tutoring. The course, the tutoring, the number of sessions, all depend on the student.

“We sell what people need,” he says. “We don’t believe in upselling.”

Your Ticket to College focuses on the standardized tests: SAT, PSAT, GRE and the like. The group is not affiliated with any other testing company, Leiser says.

A student can take one-on-one tutoring or can enroll in a small class. The group also offers evaluations to help clarify whether a child an underlying learning disability. Your ticket to college also offers workshops to teachers, counselors and professional staffers, to help them learn how to teach more effectively, in terms of the standardized tests.

The business involves Leiser and Jennifer Selden, the other founding partner, who is a licensed clinical psychologist with specialized training, according to the website, as a clinical neuropsychologist. Six additional tutors work with the program. In addition to the tutoring, workshops and classes, Your Ticket to College also offers psychological evaluations to see whether the student has an underlying learning disability or problem that’s having an impact on his or her learning.

Gail Piotrowski says her two daughters struggled with the SATs and PSATs, and when Stephen neared the testing age, “I knew I needed to give him a better shot than I did with the girls.” 

 A students at Norwich Free Academy, Stephen had taken the tests but not done well enough. Education Solutions suggested Your Ticket To College, and Gail reached out to Leiser.

“The beauty of it was that I felt like I gave Stephen the right shot,” Gail says. Leiser made Stephen understand, she says, and “pinpointed that he didn’t get how the test worked.”

With Stephen, she says, Leiser focused on confidence levels, and drilled him hard. He individualized the work and developed a real rapport with Stephen. “His scores went up every single time,” Gail says. He got into Northwestern. 

Doug Barlow describes nearly the same experience. Eric was the third child in the family to take the SATs. He had struggled with the PSATs. “The classroom situations didn’t seem to have the impact,” Barlow says. 

Leiser was able to show Eric how to pace himself, Barlow says. And again, Leiser and Eric developed a strong mentor/student relationship.

“Eric feels very close to Adam,” Barlow says. “The one on one type of thing takes advantage of that.”

He says Leiser was able to suss out Eric’s personality and work with it – and also work on Eric’s test-taking skills.  And it worked. Eric was accepted into a majority of the schools to which he applied.

Leiser says that while his company does teach the test, it first teaches the skills, if the skills are lacking. Then, he says, “I believe that the logic we use – it’s still a use that is a higher-order critical thinking skill that kids need.”  So, he teaches to the test, but believes that the skills involved in learning to ace the test are skills the student will use in other areas of life.

Even though teachers might cringe at his methods, Leiser says, they are effective.

For instance, in the sentence completion area of the SATs, he says, 95 percent of the kids read the sentence five times or more and then decide on the answer. His students, he says, don’t read the sentence at all – and come up with the answers very, very quickly.

This unorthodox method is based on logic – and on the tests themselves.

“The tests will change,” he says, “but the type of question will not.”