Prepping for the Big Leagues
For most college students, the formerly dreaded SAT has become nothing more than an irrelevant number from the past. But for Jason Y. Shah ’11, the plight of SAT prep for high school students is the basis of his enterprise, INeedAPencil.com. Unlike more famous companies such as Kaplan and Princeton Review, which often charge several hundred dollars for a preparatory course, is geared toward low-income and underprivileged students.
“WRITING” THE PROGRAM
Shah says he was inspired to start the project in fall 2006 as a junior in high school. While helping some sixth graders write essays about their Thanksgiving plans, one student asked Shah how to spell the word “ball” three times. “That really hit me hard,” says Shah.
He began to think of ways to approach this problem. The first project was an in-person tutoring program, but Shah says he found himself unsatisfied. “You end up doing a lot of the same things over and over again,” he says. “It’s not rewarding sometimes. That’s when the idea for the Web site was born.”
Launched in April 2007, INeedAPencil.com offers SAT prep for free. It provides lessons and practice test questions, and users are able to customize their sessions to fit a certain time frame. But INeedAPencil.com also adds special features to the typical program. These include a visual progress chart that keeps track of completed lessons, a score projector that calculates the actual expected test score based on aggregate performance, and even a “confidence calibrator” that allows users to indicate the level of confidence in their answers. “It hones your ability to decide whether to risk answering a question or not,” says Shah.
Although the Web site does not offer live support through video or chat, Shah does maintain 24-hour e-mail support for users. He says that he commonly receives e-mails from users seeking advice about college selection.
The results speak for themselves. Since the Web site’s launch, it has already garnered a base of 24,000 students. And not only is the number of users impressive, but the program seems to achieve its intended goal: according to Shah, a 200-point increase in total score is typical over the length of the course.
THE “MATH” TO SUCCESS
One of INeedAPencil.com’s success stories is Evan M. Kendall, currently a junior at Sharon High School in Sharon, Mass. He discovered the Web site through a Facebook group. “It was a really helpful tool,” he says. “It was free, it was at my convenience, and it worked.” Apart from using the practice tests on CollegeBoard’s Web site, Kendall says exclusively used INeedAPencil.com for test prep. “It’s very interactive, and it just seems more hands-on than, say, Kaplan or Barron’s, where it’s so large that you feel insignificant,” says Kendall. “This made you feel more like it’s personalized.”
Kendall says that he took the SAT in March as practice and that he had intended to take them again last weekend. From beginning his preparation until March, his score jumped from 1800 to 2050. His strength lies in math but that his performance on the writing section could use improvement. He found the question generator very helpful in keeping his practice tailored toward his weaknesses. The one potential drawback? The lack of practice for the essay: “That might be the only setback that there is right now, because it’s harder to grade an essay than a multiple choice section with an obvious answer,” he says.
Kendall adds that INeedAPencil.com also helped him with his college search. “From the Web site I see that my scores fit in the areas of applicants that applied to some college that I am interested in,” such as the University of Virginia or New York University, he says. “I feel that with the improvement that my scores have made, I have a legitimate chance of getting into those schools.”
“READING” THE FUTURE
Shah says that currently he is uncertain about the future of INeedAPencil.com. “I’ll keep it running perpetually,” he says. “But I might find somebody else to run it and still continue to own it so I can start new projects, continue expanding.”
Shah says his interests lie primarily in the social aspect of entrepreneurship. He has taken Professor David L. Ager’s course Sociology 159: “Social Entrepreneurship,” and INeedAPencil.com won the social entrepreneurship category of the I3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge this year. His I3 presentation was impressive enough to attract the attention of Sunil S. Nagaraj, a Harvard Business School student who had already known Shah for some time and is now acting as his mentor.
However, Nagaraj does say that the Web site may change direction. “What Jason and I have been struggling with is, should this remain a social enterprise or should it become a for-profit enterprise?” he says. Although this decision is yet to be made, the current focus is to make small changes such as improving the site’s visual layout. Nonetheless, Shah’s mentors seem impressed with his current success, and it is likely that he will have a future in entrepreneurship. “Jason is incredibly charismatic, and he has the right balance of substance and form,” says Nagaraj.
“He’s got one of the most important qualities that entrepreneurs need to have: he’s a go-getter,” adds Roy I. Ben-Dor, another HBS student and mentor to Shah.
Kendall says he has spoken to Shah once or twice about his program to compliment him on the site’s success. “It’s nice to see when high school and college students focus on not only their peers,” he says. “For instance, he came up with this in high school, but then after high school he kept up with the idea and is still working on it.”