Location: Boston, MA
Starting GRE Score: 145Q 154V
Final GMAT Score: 160Q 162V
School Attended: Harvard Business School
Chloe was a classic case of someone who is very smart but not great at Math or at standardized tests. She was also one of the many people I tutor with testing accommodations (extra time because of learning disabilities or anxiety or ADHD). Even with the extra time, Chloe had trouble finishing the test on time and that problem persisted all the way through to the end of the process.
At first Chloe was not sure if she wanted to take the GMAT or GRE. We started agnostic and then after a couple of weeks we decided the GRE was a better fit – the lack of a calculator on the GMAT was just a deal breaker for her. Even still, as we do with GRE students here at RTP, I had Chloe use mostly GMAT quant questions at first to make sure that she would really be prepared for the harder GRE questions that she’d likely to see on the actual exam (and that aren’t well represented in the official released GRE questions).
Initially there was a lot to onboard for Chloe, especially on the Quant side – she was very weak both on content and strategy. But as is often the case in these situations, while helping Chloe learn and master the content was indeed an important part of the process, the crucial thing was really getting Chloe to use her innate reasoning skills instead of trying to treat Quant questions like they were just exercises in demonstrating pure Math ability. She would never have scored as high as she ultimately did if the latter had been her attitude, because pure Math just wasn’t her thing. But she DID have good logical reasoning ability, so it was mostly a matter of helping her see how she could use those skills and, more importantly, getting her to do so in a timed setting.
As we got closer to her test date, I would often catch her “with her head down” just grinding away at Math when what she really needed to do was “pop her head up” and think about how she was approaching the question and whether there was a better way to proceed. She understood this conceptually, but it’s often hard to make it happen in practice, especially once the clock is ticking.
Partly because of the above, we also needed to work on time management. As previously mentioned, even with the extra time she would still sometimes run out of time (this is typical, actually – people tend to “fill the space” and use whatever time they are given). She needed to recognize which questions were not worth her time or at the very least not worth doing initially and better to come back to if she had time at the end. Again, this is easier said than done! Part of the problem again stemmed from her tendency to just put her head down and grind. So we worked on really taking time in the beginning of each question to not only ask HOW she should approach the question, but also WHETHER she should approach it in the first placel (or just make an educated guess or save it for later). This skill of really sizing up questions BEFORE diving into them is something that most people are not used to and it’s something that we at RTP almost always need to address with students. It’s a crucial determinant of success on the GRE and GMAT!
In the end Chloe was able to make the adjustments and really nail it on the GRE. It took her several tries because on one test she would have a high Quant score but mediocre Verbal score and then on another the reverse would be true. This is again typical and one of the main reasons that people take the exams multiple times. But ultimately she got the score she wanted and was admitted to Harvard!