Dr. Tejas Karnati, MD

The Story

The strategies that built a career — now built into a curriculum.

It started in 12th grade.

By 2008, as a senior at his Michigan high school, Dr. Karnati had already done what most students aim for and never quite reach: a perfect 36 on the ACT and a perfect 2400 on the SAT, the top score on the scale in use at the time. He was admitted to multiple Ivy League schools and highly ranked public universities, and he chose his path with one of the most competitive academic profiles in his class.

That same year, classmates and underclassmen started asking him to tutor them. Word travelled. Parents called. He spent his last year of high school teaching — and discovered that the test-taking strategies he had assumed were obvious were anything but. They were the entire game. They were the difference between a 1450 and a 1550, between a 33 and a 36, between an admit and a deferral.

Full scholarships, and a deliberate path through medicine.

Dr. Karnati earned full scholarships for both undergraduate and medical school, and continued securing competitive placements throughout his academic career. He chose neurosurgery — one of the most demanding and selective specialties in all of medicine. The path from a Michigan high school to a neurosurgery operating room is not a path that forgives sloppy preparation. It demands discipline, pattern recognition, performance under pressure, and a relentless willingness to study what's actually on the test rather than what feels intuitive. Through all of it — college, medical school, and even the first year of residency — he kept teaching.

Those are the same skills the SAT, ACT, and PSAT reward.

The students who score the highest aren't the ones who know the most material. They're the ones who prepare the most deliberately.

Why come back to teaching?

He never really stopped. From his first students in 2008 through 2018, Dr. Karnati taught in person at every stage of his own training — as an Ivy applicant, an undergraduate, a medical student, and into the first year of his neurosurgery residency. When residency made in-person teaching impractical, he kept coaching students virtually from 2018 onward, quietly refining the same strategies one student at a time. Across those years he has personally tutored more than 2,000 students, learning exactly what moves a score across hundreds of cohorts.

In 2026 he decided to do it properly — and at scale. Tejas Test Prep brings that entire body of work to families in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, in person and live online, and to students across the United States and beyond through virtual cohorts. Most prep companies license a textbook, hire generalist tutors, and run classes through the motions. This is the opposite: the same conviction that drove a perfect 36, now built into the curriculum your child will study from.

What that means for your student.

Every learning module, every practice question, every full-length exam, and every analytical report at Tejas Test Prep was authored or vetted by Dr. Karnati and a team of fellow perfect scorers. There is no licensed material, no off-the-shelf course package, no contract instructor working from someone else's notes. The instruction is direct, the strategies are tested, and the standards are the ones that produced a perfect 36 — not the ones that produced a brochure.

This is, intentionally, a small academy. Cohorts are limited. Attention is direct. Outcomes are tracked. And the founder is in the room.