Hire the Best Online GRE Tutors
(If you’re just looking for current GRE tutoring rates, you’re welcome to click here, but we strongly encourage you to read the rest of this page before you think about hiring us. Your call, though.)
This is the page where we’re supposed to tell you that we’re magical GRE tutors who can teach you a bunch of “tips and tricks” to raise your score by 20 points in 3 weeks -- GUARANTEED!
Sorry, we don’t do any of that. We really do have outstanding track records as GRE tutors: we’ve helped hundreds of students achieve dramatic score improvements, and our GRE students have been admitted to nearly every top MBA program in the world, along with plenty of other graduate programs, including a wide variety of MiM, MFin, and PhD programs.
If you want proof, you’re always welcome to ask for references, or you can click here for piles of reviews of our tutoring. We’re relentlessly honest people, and we won’t feed you a line of crap about massive, easy score improvements, since improving your GRE score is rarely easy.
We’ll make you work hard – and work efficiently – to achieve your GRE goals. Think of tutoring as a partnership: we’ll provide structure, passion, and expert guidance, but we’ll expect you to provide a whole lot of time, energy, and introspection, too.
Uncovering Your Real GRE Weaknesses
As GRE tutors, our job is to figure out what, exactly, holds you back from your score goals – especially if it’s not what you ever would have expected. We never spend our tutoring sessions simply going through random GRE problems. Instead, we uncover the fundamental causes of your underperformance on the GRE.
Almost every GRE test-taker would love to believe that they just need to learn a few more math formulas or time management tricks, and their GRE problems will be solved. But reality is usually more complicated than that, unfortunately. Sure, sometimes the problem is something simple and fixable – such as rusty geometry foundations or a bad approach to GRE Critical Reading passages – but many test-takers have far more subtle weaknesses.
For example, maybe you’re sloppy and rush through easy questions, or you’re stubborn on the harder questions, or you’ve never really learned how to understand the author’s purpose when you read a Critical Reading passage, or you don’t know how to stop “using your ear” on Text Completion or Sentence Equivalence questions. Or maybe you’re struggling to fully take advantage of the fact that you can skip questions on the GRE, and come back to them later.
Or maybe the core problem isn’t specific to the GRE at all. Maybe you’re suffering from test anxiety, or your unstable diet leads to an unstable performance, or you don’t sleep enough, or you simply need to get better at eliminating distracting thoughts on test day.
We could go on. The bottom line is that we’ll help you build a deeper understanding of what REALLY holds you back on the GRE -- even if it’s not something you ever would have expected. Our most significant breakthroughs come from digging inside our students’ minds, and discovering the habits and processes that lead to unnecessary errors — and then figuring out how to change those behaviors.
In many cases, we’re able to succeed with students who have battled the GRE for months or years before hiring us. It’s not uncommon for us to help students achieve a major breakthrough after they’ve already done every official GRE problem several times, after they’ve hired three other high-priced tutors, after they’ve taken multiple GRE prep courses, or after they’ve taken the exam six times. (Yes, those are all real examples.)
We succeed with the toughest GRE cases because we’re not afraid to be unorthodox. If you’ve already taken every GRE test-prep course in existence, we’re probably the tutors who can figure out exactly why those courses haven’t helped you achieve your goals.
And if you’re completely new to the GRE, that’s great, too. We’re always thrilled to work with students who haven’t yet developed bad GRE study habits, and our experience with tough cases gives us a unique perspective on how to build the right habits of mind from the very start. Whenever we have the pleasure of working with GRE rookies, we’ll happily guide you to your best possible GRE score quickly and efficiently.
Not sure whether to take the GRE or GMAT?
If you’re applying for an MBA, MFin, MiM, or another business-oriented degree, odds are good that your target program is willing to accept either the GMAT or GRE. In most cases, graduate programs that accept both exams have no fundamental preference for one exam or the other. And for the most part, whether you choose the GMAT or the GRE is mostly a matter of personal preference.
We do, however, find that applicants with elite GMAT scores tend to have an advantage in the MBA admissions process. Historically, the GRE has been less of a factor in MBA rankings – and the GMAT simply has a longer track record in MBA admissions than the GRE does – so an elite GMAT score will typically improve your odds of admission more than an elite GRE score. So our general advice is to take the GMAT if you’re confident that you’ll have a shot at a spectacular score.
If, on the other hand, your MBA profile is outstanding but your standardized test-taking skills aren’t amazing, then you might want to consider the GRE or even the Executive Assessment, depending on your exact circumstances.
In particular, the GRE might be a better fit if any of these situations apply to you:
You’re comfortable with statistics and algebra and geometry, but you struggle on the toughest GMAT-style quant questions. Because of differences in the way the tests are constructed, it’s possible that a test-taker with moderately strong quant skills -- and relatively little propensity to make unforced errors -- would be much more successful on the GRE than on the GMAT.
You’re better at vocabulary than grammar. To be honest, we’ve tutored very few test-takers who fit this description. Maybe a really well-read native English speaker who lacks the discipline and grammar knowledge to do well on GMAT Sentence Correction?
You struggle to “move on” from questions on the GMAT. On the GRE, you can skip questions and return to them within any individual 20-question section. For some test-takers, this feature of the GRE can reduce test anxiety and prevent “timing meltdowns” at the end of test sections.
Although many test-takers tell us that the GRE feels easier, experience has shown us that “feel” isn’t necessarily a great predictor of your final test score. So if you’re not sure which exam is best for you, try official practice tests for both the GRE and GMAT, and see which of your scores is closer to the averages at your target MBA programs.
For more on the GMAT vs. GRE decision, check out this article or this video:
If you’re still not sure which exam to take, feel free to contact us, and we’ll get you pointed in the right direction. Many of our students choose to start with the GMAT and then consider switching to the GRE after a few weeks, once we develop a deeper understanding of a student’s “ceiling” on each exam. Since our first few GMAT lessons generally translate seamlessly to the GRE, very little is lost if we switch from the GMAT to the GRE relatively early in the process.
How Online GRE Tutoring Works
The whole point of private GRE tutoring is that we don’t follow a rigid curriculum, and everything we do is based on each student’s unique situation. We rely heavily on data from your GRE diagnostic report, practice exams, and homework, along with proprietary assessments to help diagnose test-day performance issues as needed.
When you sign up for GRE tutoring online, our first goal is to understand your mind better than you understand it yourself. We’ll take a deep dive through your previous GRE results, we’ll assign a pile of diagnostic homework, and then we’ll watch you in real-time to see how your brain works.
Once we understand exactly what’s driving your GRE results, we’ll create a plan to address your issues. After each session, we’ll assign a personalized homework list, designed to maximize the effectiveness of your study time. And then we’ll meticulously track and analyze your results, with the goal of helping you build new habits that will get you to your target score. Every step of the way, we’ll adjust our improvement plan based on your progress.
In other words, everything we do is customized to address the quirks of your individual brain, and no two students ever have the same experience with our tutors.
Because everybody faces their own unique challenges, we don’t generally expect – or even want – students to commit to a certain number of sessions before they start tutoring. Unless our Test Anxiety Program is a perfect fit for you, we won’t offer you a GRE tutoring “package” in advance, since most students have no idea how much tutoring they’ll really need when they first start the process. Most of our students just pay for one GRE tutoring session at a time.
In other words, you’re welcome to fire us anytime if you’re not making progress after you start tutoring with us, and we won’t ever sell you anything that you don’t actually need.
About Our GRE Tutors
Because we understand that a pre-written curriculum won’t help most of our students, we only hire tutors with the skills to deeply understand students’ minds and find unique solutions to their GRE struggles. We’re successful only because our tutors are broad-minded, flexible, emotionally intelligent, and creative, in addition to being great at taking standardized exams themselves.
As a result, we end up hiring interesting people. Our team includes a novelist with more than 15 years of GRE tutoring experience, another novelist who narrowly avoided becoming a doctor instead, an accomplished surfer with a 790 GMAT score, a former Army captain and West Point graduate, a Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking pastor, a former semipro rugby player, and an ex-professional dancer with perfect scores on the GRE and GMAT (and an impressive track record as an eater).
We hire fewer than 2% of applicants who want to work with us, and we inflict a cruel audition process on potential tutors. Our founder painstakingly trains our GRE tutors personally, and we all collaborate frequently to make sure that we continuously improve as teachers. We all use the same materials and employ the same philosophies, and we’ve all trained — hard — to become nimble in our approach to tutoring.
Sure, we all have different personalities, but we work tirelessly to be similarly great at our craft, and we’re as unified as a collection of GRE and GMAT tutors possibly can be.
For more on the unique personalities on our team, check out our tutor bios.
No salespeople or “academic advisors” -- we’re just tutors
When you contact us for tutoring, you’ll never hear from a salesperson. The only people who will ever see your intake form are GRE tutors, starting with our founder, who is the only person who ever answers tutoring or MBA admissions consulting inquiries.
We’ll be 100% honest from the start if we don’t think we can help, or if we don’t think that your goals are realistic. That may or may not be what you want to hear -- but we really don’t want your money unless we’re confident that we can help you improve your GRE score.
So from the very start, be prepared for plenty of honesty, with no hollow guarantees or other sales-y silliness.
Hey, wait.
If you’re such great GRE tutors, why aren’t you called GRE Ninja?
We pride ourselves on brutal honesty, so we won’t sugarcoat our lack of marketing savvy: our founder started using the GMAT Ninja name as something of a joke back in 2009, when he still offered GRE and LSAT tutoring, but happened to live in a particularly GMAT-hungry area of New York City. He never thought that the GMAT Ninja name would actually stick.
But here we are, well over a decade later. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As it turns out, the GRE has rapidly gained prominence in the MBA admissions world since then, and all of our tutors are now every bit as well-versed in the GRE as in the GMAT. Both Charles and Dave – our two most grizzled tutoring veterans – started teaching GRE courses before the GMAT even entered their lives. And our GRE students have been admitted to nearly every one of the world’s top MBA programs.
In other words, don’t the name fool you. For somewhat obvious reasons, we’ve resisted the urge to rebrand as “GRE and GMAT Ninja” or “GRE/GMAT/EA/LSAT Ninja”, but the GRE is just as much a part of our DNA as the GMAT.
Be ready to study HARD with us
We’re flexible in our approach to tutoring, but we’re fairly inflexible about one thing: we expect our students to do a ton of homework every week if they want to achieve real results. For the GRE, we generally assign roughly 15 hours of homework each week, with the idea that you’ll complete about two hours on weekdays, and a bit more on the weekend.
So if you want a painfully honest (but usually very polite) GRE tutor who will kick you to the curb if you don’t do your homework, give us a shout. We’re really nice people in real life and we rarely enjoy kicking anybody to the curb, but it’s not fun for us to sit around and babble about the GRE while you waste your money on us.
So we’ll be completely straight about what we can do for you, and about what YOU need to do to achieve your GRE goals.
Again, there’s no magic to any of this. Hiring a GRE tutor is like hiring a personal trainer: if you want your GRE brain to get big and buff, you need to pump some serious (quantitative and verbal) iron outside of our tutoring sessions. If any tutor tells you that a huge GRE score increase is easy, he or she is lying through their teeth.
It certainly may be possible to raise your GRE score by 20 points or 30 points or more, but it will require hours and hours of carefully focused practice on an almost-daily basis — and a willingness to change the fundamental ways you read, react, and think on a standardized exam.
Our tutors are currently located in Colorado, California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, and Scotland. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, 100% of our students have chosen online tutoring, but if you’re interested in in-person tutoring in any of our locations, just let us know when you contact us.
If you’re ready to get rolling, please tell us your story here, and we’ll give you a 100% honest assessment of what we think we can do to help. And if we think your goals aren’t realistic, we’ll be honest about that, too.
Thank you for reading this far, and good luck with your GRE and grad school ambitions!