Franklin Yard Q+A: Mark Ramachandran

Mark Ramachandran, a student at Carnegie Vanguard in Houston, sits down for a Q+A with Sam Bellows, his tutor at Franklin Yard.

Since you’re someone who was able to score a 1590, I wanted to ask: there are plenty of people who are smart, who know the content, who are good test takers, but who can’t quite score at the very top. What do you think actually makes the difference between those good scorers and the top, top, top scorers?

Well, it’s not about getting perfect on homework or practice tests. It’s making enough mistakes that you know every single possible mistake you could make, so you don’t make them again. I didn’t mind making mistakes because I learned the most from them.

I love that. I couldn’t agree more. On that note, you had one habit that stuck out to me: you insisted on screenshotting questions that “bothered you.” That always struck me as a good sign. Most people, understandably, just want to move on.

People want to cover up their mistakes, right?

Exactly. Have you always had that mindset? Like, “I don’t care, I just want to learn”?

I mean, I want to win. And you can’t win if you make mistakes.

No, that’s true. Was there anything you misunderstood about the test before you really started the process?

I thought the English was more subjective. I didn’t realize the rules were so concrete—you can actually figure it out in a pretty straightforward way. I thought there was a lot more shades of grey.

What advice would you give to someone who's in a similar spot, just starting this process?

Make more mistakes [laughs]. Basically, you really helped point me in the right directions and we figured out what I had to work on. And then just grinding: practice, practice, practice…and learning from errors.

What about pattern recognition? Especially in math—there’s a limited pool of concepts that are tested, and the test heavily relies on patterns. Did you start to notice those?

Yeah, definitely. Especially when I was doing math practice exclusively. You start to notice: this type of thing, that type of thing. It becomes familiar. And a lot of the time it’s really helpful, because you remember what worked on this type of roblem in the past.

Any test-day advice?

Sleep a lot. Drink a lot of coffee. Bring the coffee to the test room—it’s amazing when you’re drowsy and you just need a refresh. Also, don’t stress. One thing that sucks—and I don’t know how to fix this—is that you start with a certain pace on the first module. You finish with plenty of time left over. But then by the second module, you realize you don’t have extra time anymore. On the first mpodule, you’re moving slow and relaxed, but you can’t do that later.

Yeah, the difficulty curve is sharp. You’re cruising, and then it suddenly gets serious [in the harder second module]. Okay, last—or maybe second-to-last—question. You’re a really capable person. I think you could’ve figured a lot of this out on your own. What did tutoring add?

Well, the official College Board explanations—they give you all these rules and reasoning, but it’s not intuitive at all. It’s not like, “Oh, I totally get it.” It’s five paragraphs of text that don’t make sense. So to answer your question, some test questions just don’t click without someone to walk you through it.

Yeah. It’s like what a robot would say.

Exactly.

All right, I think that’s everything. This was super helpful—and just fun to hear you talk through it. Please keep me in the loop on college news when we get there.

Definitely. Will do. And thanks for everything.