Campfire Session — SAT/ACT/IB Test Prep

Learn how teachers use AI to personalize test prep for AP, SAT, ACT & IB exams. Reduce student anxiety & boost scores with Flint's AI tutoring platform.

Teddy Lane, Customer Success Engineer at Flint

In this Test Prep Campfire Session, we explored how teachers are using Flint to prepare students for high-stakes assessments — from AP exams and SATs to internal finals — while building student confidence, reducing anxiety, and personalizing practice at scale.

The session combined real classroom examples from two educators with live platform demonstrations, covering strategies for differentiation, Socratic tutoring, rubric-aligned feedback, and using student performance data to inform instruction.

Content covered in this session includes:

• Using Flint for test prep across a range of assessments, including IB, SAT, ACT, AP, and school-specific exams.
• Building targeted review activities in 10–15 minutes by feeding Flint your own notes, past exams, and rubrics.
• Setting up Sparky as a Socratic tutor that guides students toward answers rather than providing them directly.
• Differentiating activities for students with varying levels of preparation, including students who have taken different prerequisite courses.
• Creating randomized question pools for reading quizzes and multiple-choice practice using uploaded textbook chapters.
• Using multi-dimensional rubrics inside Flint to replicate College Board and IB scoring structures for essay feedback.
• Identifying class-wide trends in student performance and generating individualized follow-up activities based on specific areas of struggle.
• Reducing test anxiety by giving students a low-stakes, judgment-free space to practice with unlimited questions.
• Monitoring student progress in real time through Flint's dashboard, including live session views and full chat transcripts.

Slides from the presentation can be found here.

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00:00 Introduction

• Teddy Lane opens the session and welcomes attendees, noting the timing aligns with end-of-year finals and AP season.
• Sun Paik joins to monitor the chat and field questions throughout the session.
• Attendees share the subjects and exam types they teach, including AP, IB Math AA/AI, and Theory of Knowledge.

04:24 Test prep in the news

• Teddy references recent headlines around colleges re-engaging with standardized tests after going test-optional post-COVID.
• The icebreaker question posed to attendees: should we still be teaching standardized test-taking skills even if colleges move away from requiring them?
• Teddy shares his view that exams like AP and IB serve as important capstones to a year of learning, regardless of whether students receive college credit.

07:39 Campfire session agenda

• Session outline includes a panel discussion, a live demo of building a review activity in Flint, and a closing Q&A.
• Attendees are encouraged to contribute thoughts in the chat or come off mic throughout.
• Recording will be made available after the session.

08:52 Panel discussion

• Lara Cross introduces herself as an upper school science teacher at Kincaid School in Houston, teaching on-level physics and astronomy using algebra and trigonometry.
• Bonnie-Jean Chudzinski introduces herself as an AP and Honors Dual Enrollment US History teacher at Notre Dame Prep in Scottsdale with 27 years of teaching experience.
• Bonnie-Jean describes the challenge of unifying students who arrive with different levels of familiarity with AP essay types (DBQs, LEQs, SAQs) depending on whether they took AP World or Honors World.
• Lara explains that her test prep focus is on internal exams and finals, and that Flint helps her manage differentiation when students have varying attendance due to other AP exams.
• Bonnie-Jean walks through her backward design approach to AP prep, beginning about a month before the exam and adjusting focus areas (e.g., more DBQ work vs. LEQ work) based on student needs each year.
• Both panelists discuss the challenge of balancing content mastery with test-specific skills, with Bonnie-Jean noting she makes optional after-school prep sessions available and targets the specific rubric points where the majority of students are struggling.
• Bonnie-Jean observes a growing trend of students struggling to connect what they've read to deeper analytical thinking, requiring more explicit critical thinking work throughout the year.
• Lara describes her activity creation process: keeping activities focused on a specific topic or skill, feeding Flint her own notes, past tests, and rubrics, and using the phrase "Socratic tutor" to ensure Sparky guides students rather than giving answers directly.
• Bonnie-Jean shares how she uses Flint for reading quizzes in her Honors class, feeding it online textbook chapters and requesting randomized pools of 50–60 higher-order thinking multiple choice questions timed at 10 minutes.
• Lara shares the story of a student who went from a C to a B+ after using Flint review activities, attributing the growth to reduced anxiety and Sparky's step-by-step guidance.
• Both panelists emphasize using Flint's class-level and individual feedback to identify recurring struggles and inform follow-up activities and future lesson planning.
• Lara and Bonnie-Jean discuss balancing AI-powered practice with independent skill-building, agreeing that Flint works best for very specific, targeted assignments rather than open-ended use.
• Both note that Sparky is not always 100% accurate, particularly in history and math, and encourage treating errors as teachable moments where students practice evaluating AI responses critically.

54:11 Using Flint for test prep

• Teddy shares practical tips for getting started: have your notes, rubrics, and past exams ready before building an activity, and always instruct Sparky to guide students to answers rather than provide them directly.
• Bonnie-Jean recommends telling Sparky explicitly to "stick to my resources" to reduce inaccuracies and keep activities tightly aligned to course content.
• Teddy suggests speaking into the mic for 1–2 minutes to describe your activity goal, then iterating on Sparky's output to refine it before assigning to students.
• Bonnie-Jean highlights reviewing Sparky's generated activity at multiple proficiency levels (A, B, C, D) before publishing to ensure the experience matches instructional intent.

55:50 Q&A on test prep with Flint

• Attendees raise questions about math accuracy in Sparky, with Teddy and Lara both acknowledging ongoing improvements and recommending teacher review of outputs.
• Lara shares that she awards bonus points to students who identify and correct errors in Sparky's responses, turning inaccuracies into a critical thinking exercise.
• The multi-dimensional rubric update is highlighted as a key feature for replicating College Board and IB rubric structures directly inside Flint.
• Bonnie-Jean notes significant improvement in Sparky's ability to interpret images and political cartoons compared to earlier in the school year.

57:22 Flint analytics walkthrough

• Teddy walks through a live demo of an IB math review activity built in Flint, showing how study guides and past exams were uploaded as reference materials for Sparky.
• The behavior settings panel is shown, including how to define Sparky's role (e.g., thought partner), set response style, and write specific instructions such as "do not give students hints."
• The greeting message feature is demonstrated, with Teddy showing a motivational note reminding students they are "smart and capable mathematicians."
• The class dashboard is shown, displaying student strengths, areas for improvement, and suggested follow-up activities generated from completed sessions.
• Teddy demonstrates the drill-down feature, where clicking on highlighted words in the class summary pulls up the specific chat moment where a student demonstrated understanding or struggled.
• The live session monitoring view is shown, allowing teachers to see in real time which students are hitting a wall or disengaging during an activity.
• Individual session transcripts are reviewed, showing the full conversation between a student and Sparky, including the opening motivational message and question-by-question progression.
• The follow-up activity generator is demonstrated, showing how Flint identifies uncovered content areas (e.g., specific chapters not yet practiced) and builds a targeted activity for an individual student.

01:06:22 Conclusion

• Teddy previews the next Campfire Session on May 28th, focused on writing student feedback using Flint's tools to incorporate student work analysis into written comments.
• Lara and Bonnie-Jean are thanked for their time and depth of experience, with Bonnie-Jean noting the session falls on her last day of school before summer.
• Attendees are encouraged to reach out with questions or platform feedback, and reminded that the recording and slides will be shared after the session.

Have a use case you'd like us to cover in a future Campfire? Reach out and let us know!