Acclaimed national tutoring academy opens Friendship Heights location

An acclaimed national tutoring academy The New York Times has said may be New York City's “premier tutoring service" has opened a new location in Friendship Heights. Advantage Testing, located at 5335 Wisconsin Avenue NW #335, draws inspiration from the British model of private education. Focusing not only on exam success, Advantage also seeks to aid students in developing writing, reading, and analytical thinking skills. In-person and remote tutoring are available for students from the middle school level through college and graduate school. 

All Advantage Testing tutors have achieved scores in the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT, and are graduates of many prestigious universities, including Columbia, Emory, Swarthmore, Vanderbilt and Yale. Beyond the personalized sessions offered, weekly proctored practice exams are conducted at the Friendship Heights location, which is convenient to the Friendship Heights Metro station. 

Founder Arun Alagappan, a Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate, established Advantage Testing, Inc. in 1986. Current members of the Advantage Testing Foundation Board of Trustees are Shirley Tilghman, who joined as President of Princeton University; John Sexton, who joined as President of New York University; Martha Minow, who joined as Dean of Harvard Law School; John Manning, the current Dean of Harvard Law School; Tom Hill, former vice chairman of the Blackstone Group; Lauren Frank, a leader in educational philanthropy; Beth Nash, a leader in educational philanthropy; Sandor Lehoczky, a senior leader at Jane Street; BK Fulton, the founding chairman and CEO of Soulidifly Productions; Jacquelyn Stone, a partner at McGuireWoods; and Troy McKenzie, the Dean of New York University School of Law. Former members of the board include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

"No mode of instruction is more powerful than one-on-one tutoring," Alagappan says. "If you think back to the teachers who have had the most lasting influence on you, you may recognize that they were the ones who spoke to you as an individual, and challenged you." David Sommers, who holds degrees from Vanderbilt University and George Washington University, is the Washington, D.C. Director of Advantage Testing. Prior to joining Advantage in 2011, he gained classroom experience as an English teacher in Washington, D.C. and Jaffa, Israel, and as an adjunct English professor at a CUNY school in New York.