Location: New York City
Starting GMAT Score: 620
Final GMAT Score: 740
School Attended: Harvard Business School
Aaron came to me with very little experience with the test and an initial practice test score of 620. In our first session it became clear to me that Aaron was a very smart guy and that he had the kind of creative problem solving and logical reasoning ability that the GMAT tends to reward, so I did something that I don’t usually do (unless I feel pretty confident about it): I told him that I thought he was destined for a score well above 700.
One reason that I have chosen to use Aaron for a case study is that his situation illustrates how my approach varies depending on the student. Part of what I do in my first session or two is get an idea of what kind of person I am dealing with (on many different levels really, from level of organization to work ethic to the way the person problem solves). This helps me craft a game plan that I think will mesh best with that particular person.
In Aaron’s case, he was very weak on content since he was very new to the test, so ordinarily I would have had him work in a very structured way outside of our meetings to build a good level of GMAT content mastery. In Aaron’s case, however, it became clear to me that he was not the type of person who would want to spend the time going methodically through all of the content, especially if it was divorced from real, official GMAT questions. So we decided that he would do no content work at all (this is not something that I would ordinarily do with someone so weak on content) and would instead work through the OG questions in a very structured way so that we could easily analyze where his weaknesses were. When there were issues that were content related (and there were definitely some) we covered them together and the overall the progress went really well with the game plan we set up.
On his first GMAT Aaron scored a 710, which was obviously a great score, but we both felt like he could do better. This was based in part on my somewhat subjective opinion of his ability, but also on the practice test scores he had been getting (in the 730 to 750 range). He decided to do some light prep on his own and take it again and unfortunately scored worse. I didn’t hear from Aaron for a while until almost a year later when he wrote to tell me that he wanted to take one more shot at the GMAT and wanted my help. We did a few sessions together to get him back into game shape and he finally nailed it – 740!