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Nervous about the new SAT? He's not.

THE BIG DAY has arrived: Saturday, March 5, the debut of the College Board's new SAT. As college-bound juniors gnashed their teeth last week and sharpened their No. 2 pencils in preparation, staff writer Steve Bohnel talked with 26-year-old entrepreneur Shaan Patel, who leveraged his own perfect 2400 score on the old SAT into a Shark Tank-funded test-prep business that recently opened a branch in King of Prussia.

As seen on "Shark Tank," SAT-prep mogul Shaan Patel, who turned down a full ride at Villanova but circled back to the Philly suburbs to open a prep center in King of Prussia.
As seen on "Shark Tank," SAT-prep mogul Shaan Patel, who turned down a full ride at Villanova but circled back to the Philly suburbs to open a prep center in King of Prussia.Read moreABC

THE BIG DAY has arrived: Saturday, March 5, the debut of the College Board's new SAT. As college-bound juniors gnashed their teeth last week and sharpened their No. 2 pencils in preparation, staff writer Steve Bohnel talked with 26-year-old entrepreneur Shaan Patel, who leveraged his own perfect 2400 score on the old SAT into a Shark Tank-funded test-prep business that recently opened a branch in King of Prussia.

In addition to building his 2400 Expert SAT Prep business - now with a $250,000 investment from TV "shark" and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban - Patel is a medical student at the University of Southern California and MBA candidate at Yale. (He coulda gone to Villanova on a full-ride scholarship but turned it down.)

Patel grew up in Las Vegas and attended public schools. He shared test-taking tips, Shark Tank tidbits and some thoughts on why the Philadelphia region is pretty perfect itself as a growth market for an SAT test-prep startup.

Q What was it like being challenged by the sharks?

It's tough. I was surprised at how much I got grilled. Mark Cuban, in the very beginning, was not really buying it. That's really when my heart dropped.

Going in, as a young person who's interested in being a serial entrepreneur, I definitely wanted Cuban, for sure. He loves sports, too. I'm like, "He's the guy to be."

It was very interesting to see him do a 180. You could call that luck or good fortune. It was a very cool experience.

Q What's scarier: being on Shark Tank or taking the SAT?

I still think the SAT was tougher. Definitely, taking the SAT is one of the biggest and scariest moments of anyone's life.

Funny story about when I got my 2400: It was flooding in Vegas that day, and my parents dropped me off by the curb. I was wearing these Converse canvas sneakers, and I stepped directly in this huge flood of water.

My feet were soaked, so I went to the bathroom and threw away my socks. But I kept my wet Converses on, and my feet were freezing the whole time.

Q Do you think the cold feet helped?

Who knows. My first couple of SATs, I was very nervous, and I remember during that last one, I was very relaxed. Maybe I was more focused on my feet than being worried about the test.

Q How did the idea of 2400 Expert SAT Prep start?

I had never really planned to start a SAT prep company. In high school, I studied a lot for the SAT. I spent hundreds of hours, pretty much locked myself in the library, and I kept a notebook about processes that were going right, going wrong, things that I noticed were helping me on the test.

So, basically, I improved my score from around average, a 1760, to a perfect score. That's pretty rare. It completely changed my life. I got offers to prestigious universities. I got to meet the President of the United States.

And so when I was in college, the idea really was to write a SAT prep book to help other students prepare the way I did. I pitched my book out to over 100 literary agencies and publishers, and pretty much got turned down by every single one. I was like, "What am I gonna do?" I decided to teach some courses to see how it would go.

Those courses ended up having an average improvement, in a 6-week course, of 376 points. So while it was really hard to get that first batch of students enrolled, the second I finished it became so much easier. You had so many parents knocking on our door.

Q Why come to King of Prussia?

A couple of reasons. One is that after I [eventually] got a book deal from McGraw-Hill, I could see on the Nielsen BookScan the cities where my books sell the most. Philadelphia was in the top five or 10, so we definitely knew there was interest.

A lot of our online students were enrolling from the Philadelphia area. We went to where demand was.

Q What are some SAT strategies you teach?

One simple strategy, really simple, is the word "being." It's almost always incorrect on the SAT writing grammar section. Another one is that you can avoid algebra on the SAT, oftentimes, because it's a multiple-choice test.

Typically in high school, you're not going to have a math teacher give you an algebra test that's multiple choice because you can avoid the algebra by just plugging the answers into the equation and see what works. But you can do that on the SAT.

So a lot of students that struggle with algebra, I teach them this strategy, and immediately their math score goes up.

Q Is taking the SAT about having a certain skill set?

It's a little bit of everything - well, a lot of everything. You have to learn the strategies, you have to learn the content and you also just have to build the stamina to take a 4-hour test.

That's why we give our students, every weekend, a 4-hour SAT exam in order to build mental stamina. It's not easy to do when you're 16 or 17 years old. It actually probably isn't easy for most adults.