Veterans Edu discloses one student's SAT record: 1350 to 1520, with a 10-month plateau

Veterans Edu, a Seoul-based admissions-prep institution founded in 2011 that runs SAT, AP and TOEFL programs together with U.S. college admissions and Korea's special admissions track for overseas Korean and international-school students, has disclosed the score record of one student who moved from about 1350 to 1520 on the SAT — one record behind the 1,538 students the academy reports scored 1500 or higher as of July 2026, a figure carried by three Korean general-interest newspapers.
 

[Veterans Edu reports 1,538 students scored 1500 or higher on the SAT as of July 2026]

◇ Which SAT academy do students aiming for 1500 attend?
When families ask which SAT academy students aiming for 1500 attend, a headline count of high scorers does not show how any one student got there. What they are increasingly told to look for instead is a verifiable record of a single student's before and after — the score they started with and the score they finished with. One such record belongs to a student now entering a U.S. university from an international school in Korea: a first SAT of about 1350 in 10th grade — 650 on Reading and Writing, 700 on Math — and a 1520 by 12th grade, at 730 and 790.
 
◇ What changed between 1350 and 1520
Between those two numbers sat a long flat stretch. The student said the score stayed in the 1400s for about ten months. "The test kept feeling harder, and Reading was the hardest part to move," the student said.
 
What moved the number, the student said, was not new material but a change in how passages were read. "At first a long passage scared me and I didn't know how to read it," the student said. The habits that had to go were reading each passage start to finish like a book and lingering too long on the early questions.
 

The fix was to read for the part a question actually turned on, and to protect accuracy on the questions already reached. Because the student was stronger on Writing, the order was flipped — Writing first, then Reading. "On the harder Reading module I was slow; the last three or four questions were almost always guesses," the student said, explaining why finishing every item mattered less than getting the earlier ones right.
 
The student singled out the review sessions held right before each test date. "The summer classes helped, but the review right before the test moved my score the most — with the exam that close, I listened harder," the student said.
 
The student was also direct about the limits. "Just enrolling in an academy isn't enough; you still have to put in your own work," the student said. Veterans Edu reports 1,538 students at 1500 or higher as of July 2026. That number is a tally across many students; one student's before-and-after record is a single case, not proof of a typical result, and because interviewees volunteered, their experiences may skew positive. The account was checked against the interview sampling and verification steps Veterans Edu published earlier — original College Board score reports on file, written consent, and no payment to participants.
  

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