Additional GMAT Practice

As an independent GMAT tutor with a knack for the unconventional, I work with many students who, for whatever reason, couldn’t quite crack the GMAT by just working through the Official Guide or with a set of books from a given company. Often, the difficulties these students encounter are a function of impersonal classrooms or discrepant learning styles or even just lack of structure. Remedying these types of situations often requires more than simply regurgitating the same rules and tricks students might have encountered elsewhere; it requires creativity and, ultimately, adapatability.

One of the benefits of being an independent GMAT tutor is that, because I’m unconstrained by the orthodoxy and materials of any given company, I have the luxury to pick and choose among the materials and problem sets that I consider most effective for my students. For example, it’s an insider secret among most commercial companies that the Reading Comprehension questions in the Official Guide do not replicate the RC on the actual exam, but these companies continue to exhort students to focus on those questions. My approach, instead, focuses on LSAT passages. Because the LSAT is a bit more nuanced than the GMAT, focusing on LSAT practice questions is often an ideal tool for students who need more practice and want exposure to the nasty types of questions and passages the GMAT will throw at them. I also have the luxury of providing my students with a database of hundreds of official, computer-based GMAT questions from previous exams. For various reasons, most commercial companies can’t take such an approach, but, by virtue of working independently, I’m able to provide my students with questions that fully replicate the content that they will see on the exam. The combination of this adaptive approach and unconventional style is what ultimately draws many students to tutoring. There’s certainly merit to sticking to the cut-and-dry approaches advocated by many of these companies, but when the cookie-cutter nature of these strategies fails, outside-the-box thinking is often necessary to do the trick.