Cobalt Education
I'm the founder and head tutor at Cobalt Education. I sat the selective high school entrance exam and got superiors across every subject on my first attempt. Before that, I received maximum scholarship into a private school, twice.
It's not about being "smart", whatever that means. It's about consistent, directed effort toward a specific, well defined goal that gets you there. It's not about how much stuff you know, rather how well you know it. They're measuring how fast you spot rules and apply patterns, all under time pressure. Understanding that makes exams a different, easier problem.
There are countless tricks and strategies to learn, and they only help after you know the content. But the recurring patterns show up year after year, and it is these techniques that separate a student who runs out of time from one who finishes with five minutes to spare.
I started Cobalt because I watched too many capable students get average results after years at tutoring centres that just drilled endlessly without ever explaining why anything works. There's a better way to do this, and it gets better results.