Mobile

Andover College Prep

A timed, full-length SAT prep app that turned daily practice into measurable score gains for students.

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Project Snapshot

Client: Andover College Prep
Industry: EdTech / Education
Platform: iOS, Android, API, Admin Panel
Timeline: 4 Months
Our Role: UI/UX design + full-stack iOS & Android development + Admin panel development + API development

The Challenge

Andover College Prep ran in-person SAT courses and free practice-test events across Fairfield County, but the actual studying stopped the moment students left the classroom. Practice was tied to paper booklets and proctored sessions, so a student could go a full week between timed sets — and the tutors had no visibility into who was practicing or where they were struggling.

The pain points were concrete. Practice was not timed the way the real SAT is, so students never built the pacing instinct the exam demands. Results lived on paper, which made it impossible to see whether a student was improving in Algebra but sliding in Critical Reading. And the free full-length SAT events — the program's strongest lead generator — were promoted only by email and flyers, so seats went unfilled while interested students simply forgot the dates.

Commercially, this capped the business. Word-of-mouth depended on score improvements the program couldn't easily demonstrate, and every empty seat at a free event was a missed enrollment for the paid courses that followed.

There were technical constraints too: the product had to run on the iPhones students already carried, sync results reliably over patchy connections, and stay simple enough for a teenager to use unsupervised between classes.

Our Solution

iMOBDEV framed the app around one idea: make timed SAT practice something a student does on their phone every day, and give the tutors the data to coach against it.

We built a native iOS app in Objective-C on UIKit, backed by a lightweight PHP/MySQL REST API. The core was a timed test engine that mirrors the real exam — 20-question sets on a 15-minute clock, organized into the six sections students actually face: Sentence Completion, Critical Reading, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and a Math Mixed Bag. A running timer and per-question pacing taught students to manage the clock, not just answer correctly.

Every attempt was scored, stored, and synced to the cloud so progress survived across devices and reinstalls, and so tutors could review it. The results layer broke performance down by section with colour-coded scores, and each section opened into a date-by-date history showing correct, wrong, and skipped counts alongside time taken — turning a vague sense of "getting better" into a visible trend.

To convert practice into enrollment, we wired the program's free full-length SAT events and seminars directly into the app and pushed reminders through Apple Push Notifications, with dates and locations one tap away.

We delivered in phases — auth and the test engine first, then results and analytics, then the reminders and events layer — so the program could put real students on the app while later features were still in build.

The Impact

Putting a timed engine in students' pockets changed how often they practiced. Daily, self-directed test-taking replaced the once-a-week paper routine, and the section-by-section history gave tutors something they had never had: a live view of where each student was gaining and slipping, so coaching time went where it mattered most.

The reminders layer did the commercial work. With free full-length SAT events and seminars surfaced inside the app and reinforced by push notifications, attendance at those sessions became far easier to fill — and those events remained the program's most direct path into paid enrollment.

Just as important, the app gave Andover a way to *show* improvement rather than assert it, strengthening the word-of-mouth the business ran on. The phased architecture left a clean foundation for what comes next: adaptive question difficulty, full-length combined exams, and a parent-facing progress view.