The way students try to accelerate in tutoring produces worse academic results

When I graduated high school at the end of 2018, the idea of accelerating in science tutoring was beginning to appear in my circles. This would involve either Yr10 students studying the Preliminary course (Yr11) or Yr11 students studying the HSC course (Yr12). After finishing the HSC course early, an accelerated student can either repeat the HSC course a second time or go off to do  their own study.

In 2018, this was still quite rare, I would guess that it was still a single digit number of students in an entire cohort that would have done this. However, each year this number seems to keep growing, likely fuelled by a domino effect of parent students copying what they see peers doing, and tutoring businesses eager to accept the extra revenue.

One of the reasons that Wayne and I created our own tutoring organisation is that we want to play a role helping our community be better informed about how to do better at school. While many decisions made by parents are obviously done with the goal to assist their child’s academic development, intentions are very different to outcomes. We believe that there is a lot of information out there that is very poor on this topic, tainted by selection bias, survivorship bias, and financial interest. There is a clear reason why Atlas Academia does not offer an acceleration option, and here, I will step through the reasons that led to this.

Establishing the driving motivators for acceleration

While I will next unpack some of the common reasons students/parents give for acceleration, it is important to acknowledge that in the vast majority of cases, the decision to accelerate is purely fuelled by FOMO. Other students are doing it, so the only reason many need is that they don’t want to be different. This is already a recipe for disaster, and completely at odds with our teaching principles at Atlas.

There is one other important thing to state. And that is that on the other side of the equation, acceleration is great money for tutoring businesses. Students spend more time in the expensive courses. Students can be locked into a tutoring system early, which makes switching harder due to sunk-cost fallacy. Early adopters naturally become advertising to bring more students in.

For students with some actual arguments, here are some reasons that I have heard over the years:

• I want to learn the course early and have spare time to revise it in Yr12

• I have more spare time in Yr11 and can use it to focus on tutoring

• I want to do the course twice to strengthen my understanding

The argument in practice

Here is what I have seen from many years of teaching experience. Of the students that I have taught who have previous accelerated, or who I have consulted, I did not see many who achieved an academic result that justified it. Many times, this takes the form of a student who showed early potential to become very strong but struggled to improve overtime and ended up slightly above average. This was likely the same result they would have gotten even if they hadn’t repeated a tutoring course twice. This happened a lot in the past, though what has particularly disturbed me in recent years is seeing students who already started weak and remained like that. As an ‘up-and-comer’ organisation within the tutoring industry, Atlas Academia has often played the role of trying to pick up the pieces when a student joins us towards the end of their HSC year when they have already spent time being trapped with a more established business due to practices such as acceleration that we see as borderline predatory.

Not only is academic improvement not guaranteed when accelerating, we have seen it cause additional challenges to students. Younger students may lack the academic maturity required to properly understand the content rigorously. I am not talking about intelligence here. I am referring to the maturity to pay attention in class, put effort into homework, and learn from feedback. Students struggling on the content respond in different ways. Some will feel frustrated, and this will negatively impact their motivation. By the time they reach Yr12 and have to go a second round, most cannot be motivated to focus when they have already seen the same content. This is despite only having an incomplete understanding of the science in the first round. The result is time, money, and effort wasted, and worse overall results and student wellbeing.  

The benefits of accelerating are uncertain, the downsides are guaranteed.

The argument in principle

Acceleration of studies provides students that possess right foundations and motivation to learn content at a faster pace, and then progress to new topics to continue to develop their understanding. The second half of this is why acceleration in tutoring is inappropriate if the goal of the student/parent is to maximise their HSC result. If students finish the course early but are not given opportunities to go beyond the high school content, then this headstart is wasted. An example of this would be Select Entry Accelerated Learning (SEAL) schools in Victoria, which allows students to sit to either complete additional VCE subjects after finishing their traditional school in five years, or to simply enter tertiary education early. This allows students to continue to develop rather than stagnate and lose motivation in their studies. The circumstances in which it makes sense for us to offer an accelerated pathway in our courses is for a student who does not wish to maximise their HSC score. This could be because they want to free up time in the senior years to pursue additional studies in their own areas of interest, or to extend themselves in a STEM field. For example, they can devote more time to STEM enrichment programs such as Maths, Science, and Informatics Olympiads. Again, the objective is not to improve their HSC result, in fact, it will likely make their result worse, because they will have less proximity to the specific style and rules of HSC exam questions.

In summary...

1. Acceleration can improve your content understanding if you are disciplined, but this is not the same as increasing your HSC mark

2. We have observed that most students who accelerate do so without the appropriate motivation and end up picking up misconceptions and bad habits, which adds to the difficulty they will face when having to fix them later

3. Acceleration will be more time-consuming and costly

4. In theory, the best use of acceleration is to allow already motivated students to explore additional subjects or extend further into the sciences beyond the high school level. This should be the objective of acceleration because there is no guarantee that the student will do better in the HSC than if they had not accelerated.

5. Be careful of tutoring businesses that freely allow acceleration. The financial incentive is very good on the business side to take accelerated students.