The time waster is not knowing the material or how to apply a particular concept to a specific situation.
Lol. Not always. For my son he took a “long “time penciling the circle. Seriously. It was for the Act which is a faster test. Small little changes made a difference. I know things are different now.
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Pencils and paper and slide rules, oh my! 
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I’m a tutor, and your daughter is describing the exact profile of students who benefit most from a few targeted sessions. When the score is creeping up but the same question types keep going wrong, that is not a practice-volume problem, it is a concept problem. More drilling will not fix a shaky grasp of, say, systems of equations or comma splices. Somebody needs to sit with her missed questions and name the underlying gap, and that is genuinely hard to do for yourself.
What I would look for in the first session or two: the tutor should spend most of the time on her actual missed questions from Bluebook tests, not on a generic curriculum. If the tutor hands her a worksheet of random problems instead of dissecting her error patterns, that is a bad sign. A good diagnostic session usually surfaces two or three specific weak topics, and then the work between sessions is targeted drills on just those topics.
On the did-it-help question: for this profile, the plateau usually breaks within three to five sessions, because the student is already strong and motivated. The tutor is not teaching her how to study, just filling the specific holes self-study could not reach. If the same question types are not starting to flip after a month, the fit is wrong, not the concept of tutoring.
One practical tip: have her keep a simple error log before the first session, every missed question with the topic and why she missed it. It makes the first hour dramatically more productive.
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Thank you for all the feedback. We did engage a tutor for about 8wks focusing on her weak spots and saw tremendous success. Tutor determined one element was a content gap, others were little SAT quirks and tricks where she knew the material but hadn’t cracked the code on the test itself.
She will take it one more time next spring to hopefully bump the math a bit more, but the tutoring did pay off in her case.
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