Prepmedians Teaches ACT/SAT Test Prep Through Sketch Comedy, Parody, Music, And Rap

Listen to this article

Below is our recent interview with Kalyan Ray-Mazumder, CEO of Prepmedians:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Prepmedians?

A: Sure! Prepmedians teaches ACT/SAT test prep through sketch comedy, parody, music, and rap. We host our content on an individual learning platform on which students can track their progress through the ACT English and SAT Writing & Language sections. Our 20+ videos in each library teach students everything they need to know to succeed on these sections, starting from content covering the Parts of Speech and Independent versus Dependent clauses all the way through to strategies for the most difficult Substance and Structure questions. Prepmedians is founded upon one principle: all students deserve to laugh and learn.

Q: Kalyan, what made you realize there’s a need for a service like Prepmedians?

A: After graduating from Yale University in 2012 where I studied Theater and Psychology, I began working in New York City as an actor and an educator. I tutored the SAT and ACT for 5000+ hours and coached a majority of my students to 95th+ percentile scores on their English sections regardless of where they started and coached multiple students to perfect scores. What I found resonated with these students was that I was bringing my entertainment background to the education to make them laugh. They finally looked forward to studying! Rather than finding the process to be dreadful like most students do, these students actually enjoyed our sessions and found the skills I was teaching them to be useful and applicable to what they were doing in school and more broadly to the world around them.

It was important to me that I extend my impact beyond just the students who could afford the $250 per hour price that my company was charging me out at. Again, Prepmedians believes that ALL students deserve an impactful education. Every single one. I was fortunate to find a team of other MBAs at the University of Chicago who believed the same mission and we built Prepmedians over the past five months along with an extraordinary production team, cast, and crew, all of whom are professionals and experts of their crafts.

Recommended: Meet LiquidBlox – A Visual Website Builder For Creating Unique Sites From Scratch

Q: You’ve recently launched an entertainment-focused standardized test-preparation platform; could you tell us something more?

A: There are numerous studies that demonstrate the efficacy of “edutainment.” In particular, recent studies have shown not only that students prefer to learn through edutainment but that they also perform statistically significantly better when they do learn through edutainment. It all makes sense because as I learned while studying psychology, if the amygdala, which is the brain’s emotional center, is engaged in aiding the hippocampus, which is the brain’s memory center, then the learning process is enhanced as students increase their attention, awareness, motivation, and retention.

Thus, the principle behind how Prepmedians delivers education is founded in research. We believe that approaching education from this angle should be part of a larger movement in which teachers and students are reclaiming their education and finding the value that comes with it.

For example, when students watch our Prepmedians, who are five Broadway singer-actors and professional sketch comedians, perform parodies of celebrities and their songs, then students can more easily learn different verb tenses. One of our sketch comedians parodies Beyoncé (the most “perfect” celebrity of all) who sings in one of her songs “I’ve been thinking,” which is in the “perfect” tense (as in the Present Perfect tense). It’s easy to remember that Beyoncé is perfect, so it’s easy to remember that “I’ve been thinking” is in the present perfect tense.

Q: Can you give us insights into your pricing plans?

A: We want to always provide our offerings at a price that is accessible to students who are low and middle-income. Thus, currently we are offering our platform for free to students who are at schools and organizations that we are partnering with in Chicago. For students with more means who are learning disengaged, we are still offering full access to our platform at just $29.99. This price gives students the ability to study all the content and strategies they need to develop mastery in the English section for the June SAT and ACT. They get their own profile to track their progress as well. We priced at roughly $30 because this price is comparable to the books that are out on the market. Unsurprisingly, we have found that every student prefers watching videos to reading a book, so Prepmedians works as a favorable substitute to dry grammar books!

Recommended: Happeo Combines A Digital Workplace And Collaboration Platform With A Social Intranet

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: We are excited about the momentum we have generating. We believe Prepmedians will help a lot of students out. Currently, we are competing in the University of Chicago Social New Venture Challenge, over the summer we will be part of the Polsky Accelerator program, and by the fall we will have built out the SAT and ACT Math library. From there, we will move into the remainder of the content needed for these tests. At the same time, we will be building out our partnerships with more schools around the nation. Next year, we hope to create libraries of videos that teach interpersonal and interviewing skills, financial literacy, and other academic areas because learning is worth laughing for!