The GMAT Compass Advantage

Success on the GMAT isn’t about superficial tricks and shortcuts. It’s about learning to think intelligently and efficiently, and the goal of my tutoring program is to cultivate these skills. Having tutored students from across the spectrum — those who have already taken a large class to those who have yet to touch a book — I know the obstacles that test-takers face, and I use my years of experience to equip you with the knowledge and reasoning skills to get over these hurdles.

From the first session, I work with my clients to develop a structured and systematic plan of attack. This includes: designing a week-by-week syllabus leading up to your test date, assigning you homework at the end of each lesson to reinforce what we discussed and preview the next lesson, giving you recommendations on how to make the best use of your study time, and proactively monitoring your progress to ensure that you’re seeing measurable gains from our sessions.

I help my clients determine when to take the exam, whether to re-take the exam, how the GMAT scoring algorithm works, how much time to allot to each question, and when to strategically guess. The GMAT’s unorthodox scoring algorithm requires a study approach different from what you may have been accustomed to in college. We’ll discuss study habits to ensure that the dozens of hours you spend studying are put to optimal use.

Using official GMAT questions as our guide, we will rigorously examine each concept and sub-concept and develop systematic strategies for efficiently tackling each type of question and avoiding common pitfalls. The focus will be on re-learning the mathematical, grammatical, and analytical concepts that appear on the GMAT, how the GMAT tests these topics, and mistakes that test-takers often make. This is the foundation of the GMAT Compass approach.

We will discuss strategies to eliminate choices on questions that seem too complicated to solve. Strategies such as “plugging-in”, “testing cases”, and “backsolving” can be useful backup options in situations in which no obvious solution is apparent. This component of the preparation also includes shortcuts to reduce or even eliminate unnecessary and time-consuming arithmetic.

The high stakes of the GMAT cause many test takers to commit careless errors or simply freeze up on test day. Unfortunately, traditional test preparation programs offer test-takers little advice to get past the psychological hurdles of the exam. Though it’s not possible to ever eliminate test-anxiety, there are several techniques that, if practiced regularly, can help you manage your test-anxiety.