Why you’ll hate online GRE and GMAT tutoring with us
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. -- Gloria Steinem
At the risk of sounding a little bit mean, the test-prep industry has always been built on rosy promises and hollow guarantees. If our only goal was to collect your money, we would tell you that improving your GMAT or GRE score is easy if you just do our AMAZING tricks.
We would then add lots of pretty colors and exclamation points, and then take your money. And your GRE and GMAT scores probably wouldn’t improve.
Of course, that’s not how we do things. We’re genuinely nice people, but we’re definitely not Santa Claus -- we’re brutal realists who have worked as GRE and GMAT tutors for a long, long time. So we’ll say it to you again: improving your GMAT score can be really, really hard, even with help from the best tutors. After all, the GMAT is a “reasoning” test, not a content test, and both the GMAT and GRE are designed to be resistant to test-prep coaching.
Still reading? Great. Before you move any further with GRE or GMAT tutoring, we’re going to tell you the six reasons why you might hate tutoring with us. And if you don’t think you’ll hate any of these things, we can’t wait to work with you.
Reason #1: you think you know what your problems are on the GRE or GMAT – and don’t want to hear otherwise
Our job is to cut right to the heart of the struggles you’re having on the GMAT or GRE. And sometimes, those aren’t the problems that you WANT to have.
Some GMAT and GRE weaknesses are relatively easy to fix, especially with help from a good tutor. A few examples:
Lack of geometry knowledge
You need to “brush up” on GMAT SC grammar rules
You’re bad at ratio questions
You have no idea how to approach a GRE quantitative comparison question
We smile whenever a GMAT or GRE student genuinely struggles with these things. We’re happy to teach geometry, or grammar, or ratios, for example, and with enough effort and patience, almost any GRE or GMAT student can master the content that underpins those topics.
Trouble is, these straightforward knowledge gaps are almost never the biggest cause of struggles on standardized exams, particularly on the GMAT. Here are examples of problems that we see far more often among our GRE and GMAT students:
Bad reading habits
Test anxiety
Sloppy quant errors
Stubbornness -- like, really bad stubbornness that will cause you to spend nine minutes on a single GMAT question, even when you’re a GMAT tutor and you should know better
An insatiable desire to pick the sentence that “sounds best” on GMAT SC, even though you’ve been told repeatedly that you really shouldn’t do that
An insatiable desire to pick the word that “sounds best” on GRE text completion, even though you’ve been told repeatedly that you really shouldn’t do that, either
We could go on. The bottom line: the real problems that most test-takers face on the GRE and GMAT can be incredibly tricky to fix, and many students desperately want to believe that the problem is something easier. If you’re one of those students, you might not like us, because we’ll tell you if your test-taking problems are the opposite of what you want them to be.
Reason #2: we’ll make you study hard for the GMAT or GRE -- and we’ll call you out if you don’t.
We say this in several places on our website (here, here, and here, for example), but here it is again: if you don’t study enough, you won’t improve on the GMAT or GRE. In most cases, we’ll expect you to complete 15 hours of homework per week: 2 hours per weekday, and 3-4 hours per weekend day.
If you’re not ready to work that much, we aren’t the right tutors for you. We’ll track your homework hours every week, and if you aren’t keeping up your end of the bargain, we’ll politely ask you to hire a different tutoring service.
Reason #3: we’ll tell you if you’re a long way from your target GRE or GMAT score
Our GMAT and GRE students pay us to tell them the truth -- not to make random soothing noises. (Though we often do recommend the soothing sounds of mindfulness meditation apps to improve your test scores!)
If you’re looking for a huge GRE or GMAT score improvement, we’ll be 100% honest if you’re a really long way from your goal. For example, test-takers who retake the GMAT only improve by about 30 points on average; check out GMAC’s own data if you don’t believe us. So if you’re looking for an improvement of 100 or 150 or 200 or 300 points on the GMAT -- or the equivalent on the GRE -- you’ll need to be buckled in for a long, hard ride.
Part of our promise to you is that we won’t let you indulge in fantasies about where you stand: if you’re looking for a 200-point GMAT score improvement and you’ve made some progress, that’s great. But if you still have 100 or 150 points to go, you’ll still be facing a long, hard, and uncertain road. Part of our job as GRE and GMAT tutors is to give you constant reality-checks if your performance isn’t close to your goals.
Nobody likes to hear bad news, and we don’t love delivering it to our GMAT and GRE students. But you’re much better off hearing the truth from us than from your official score reports. We won’t hide from hard conversations about your GRE and GMAT progress, and we won’t let you hide from them, either.
Reason #4: you don’t want to be introspective about your GRE or GMAT studies
As we’ve embarked on the (decades-long!) process of becoming better GRE and GMAT tutors, we’ve realized that our students often end up undergoing their own long journey of self-discovery. We’ve seen all sorts of things over the years:
GMAT students who discover a serious test-anxiety problem that they’ve suppressed for years or decades
Test-takers who finally recognize that they’ve barely read anything in their lives; they’ve only “skimmed”
People who discover that they go into “autopilot” as they read or do math, and struggle to do anything more than apply formulas blindly -- which is often enough to do perfectly well at even an elite university, but not enough for a top GMAT score.
Again, we could go on and on. As we start to recognize the way YOUR mind works during our GRE or GMAT tutoring sessions, we’ll ask hard questions that are best answered after quite a bit of introspection.
Trouble is, some people don’t like introspection. If you’re one of them, you might not enjoy tutoring with us.
Reason #5: you don’t want anybody to “get inside your head”
This is going to sound weird, but we don’t hire GRE and GMAT tutors based on their ability to lecture eloquently, or even because of their 770+ GMAT scores. When we look for GRE and GMAT tutoring talent, we’re looking for one huge thing: the ability to “read” a student and figure out what’s REALLY holding them back.
In all honesty, this can lead to uncomfortable conversations. We aren’t afraid to ask you about anything that we think might be affecting your GRE or GMAT score. Maybe you aren’t sleeping well. Maybe there are other performance issues that could be improved through a better diet, or exercise, or meditation. Maybe you have anxiety, or even depression. Maybe there’s a self-confidence or self-identity problem (“I’m not a math person!”) that prevents you from reaching your full potential on the GRE or GMAT.
Again: we’re genuinely nice, honest people. And we do have some tact, even though it’s fun to pretend that we don’t. But if your GMAT or GRE score is hindered by personal or psychological factors, we’ll work best together if you’re comfortable letting us “figure you out” -- and if you’re comfortable talking about what we see when we look inside your head.
Reason #6: I’m tired of reading this long-winded GMAT article.
Fair enough. It’s over now. If we haven’t scared you away, we’re truly excited to work with you -- and we’re very much hoping that your path to a spectacular GRE or GMAT score requires nothing but easy fixes, like feeding you a few geometry formulas.
But we’re happy that you’re prepared for a far more nuanced test-prep journey than that. Let’s get started.