Course Structure

If you have taken practice tests, I will look them over to determine your weaknesses.  If you have not taken practice tests, I will probably have you take a full-length diagnostic test.  If you have taken an actual GMAT, I will look at your online score report. I will enter all this test information into your personal error log, which will be updated as you take additional tests. The error log allows us to keep a close eye on topics and question types that are costing you most points. I keep a record, which you can access at any time, of what we have done during each lesson. You can also access pdf files of every problem we do together and everything I write on the whiteboard.  Last but not least, I will make you a detailed, personalized day by day study schedule so you just have to study, not wonder what to study. My entire process, beginning with the information I collect during our initial free phone consultation, is very structured and data-driven. Nothing falls through the cracks. 

This section is composed of 21 questions that require you to solve a problem and select from five answer choices. In addition to teaching you the math concepts themselves, I will teach you techniques such as choosing smart numbers and "backsolving." I will also show you how to read questions more effectively, to estimate, and to write a "game plan" before you start working on the problem. Finally, I will give you greater insight into the available answer choices.

Data Sufficiency is now part of the Data Insights section of the GMAT Focus Edition. These questions  require you to determine whether two given statements are sufficient to answer a certain question. In addition to what I do for Quantitative Reasoning, I will teach you to boil the Data Sufficiency question stem down to the essential question. Once you do this, it is often very clear whether the statements are sufficient or not.

Apart from Data Sufficiency, the other Data Insights questions are Two Part Analysis, Multi-Source Reasoning, Table Analysis, and Graphics Interpretation. Using official GMAT materials, I will train you to locate the pertinent information from among the often overwhelming quantity of information provided. 

I feel it's very important to time you reading the passages so that you are aware of how long you are actually taking; I believe it is best to read the passages carefully the first time, and knowing how much time  is actually required (often less than it seems) is important.  I am not a strong believer in skimming: everything on the GMAT must be read with extreme care. Much of the time spent tutoring this section is used to familiarize you with common ways answer choices can be wrong. 

I focus on helping you learn to recognize conclusions for the types of passages that contain them (all but two types.) Much of the time spent tutoring this section is used to familiarize you with common ways answer choices can be wrong.