Perfectionism

Perfectionism & Agency

February 01, 20252 min read

"Cognitive Agency" is always difficult to explain, but easy to demonstrate.

This is a student's truncated tracker.

tracker

As you can see, he started my program with a 33 in the math section. His goal is a 36. He's reached his goal several times in practice. He scored a 35 on the last ACT.

At this point, because of super scoring, he is only working on the math section. Because of our perpetual support guarantee, we work with students until they are satisfied with their scores.

To find out how our perpetual support guarantee can help your child reach their potential, click here.

He missed 3 questions on his last practice ACT. One was on the law of sines. I double-checked that with him that he knew the law of sines. He did. What's more, the law of sines was actually given to him in the question itself. He didn't even need to know it.

You see, knowing the academics is usually NOT the reason students miss these problems. He knew the academics. He didn't know where to START. The question was counterintuitive to him.

He has an extremely high GPA (clients who start with a 33 tend to). High-performing students are often perfectionists. They don't like to "work things out." They tend to have this mindset that if they aren't sure, they could fail, and failing is bad. This mentality will have a student (to protect their perfectionism) randomly guess rather than try and fail. This limits a person's potential as they only rise to the level of what they think they can do, instead of what they are actually capable of.

This is a wonderful TED talk exploring this phenomenon.

The problem with the law of sines question was that he didn't need to DO the law of sines; the question asked what information he needed to make the law of sines WORK. This was unlike the other dozens (perhaps hundreds) of law of sines questions he had worked through while getting his high GPA.

This is where most tutoring instruction ends and the cognitive agency approach picks up. Instead of telling him what to do, I had him start working on it. "Ok, try 'a.' Is that enough information?"

He sheepishly answered, "Oh, I didn't think to try that... um, it's not enough. Ok, now I'll try 'b'. Oh, yep... that's enough. It's 'b' isn't it?"

It was.

The other two problems went much the same way.

The solution isn't to push more academics; that only feeds this beast (I do provide and review the academics, but only AFTER we have worked it out; we only memorize what we understand).

The solution is to empower students with agency.

When I didn't judge him, criticize him, or tell him he should have already known this, (I just asked him questions that kept him in the driver's seat) he could do it.

To learn how the Cognitive Agency System can help your child reach their potential, let's talk!

Lydia Terry is the author and designer of the unique "Cognitive Agency Approach" to SAT & ACT test prep!

Lydia Terry

Lydia Terry is the author and designer of the unique "Cognitive Agency Approach" to SAT & ACT test prep!

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