We don’t want to claim that this happens often, but in the last few months we had two students who needed just a single tutoring session to help them get the scores that they wanted (both also got into the top schools they applied to including HBS, Stanford, and Kellog). So we thought a “case study” would be in order to help make it clear how a single tutoring session can occasionally be enough to get a test taker to where they need to be!
The students in question are Dave and Kennedy. Although Dave took the GRE and Kennedy the GMAT, there are many similarities in their circumstances, so let’s start there. The main issue was that both lacked guidance on what they should be doing and both were not using enough official resources in their prep. Before we get into the details, let’s zoom out for a second to understand the bigger picture…
People tend to misunderstand what good tutoring is really about. At Reason Test Prep, we are not just tutors. We are guides through the process and much of the value that we provide comes from helping students understand what they should be doing, which resources to use, when to take practice tests, when to take the actual test, etc. Often this is the single most important thing, especially when someone has been prepping for a while on their own or getting guidance from someone who, unfortunately, does not know what they are talking about!
In Dave’s case, he had actually had 2 tutors before, both of whom worked for a very expensive tutoring company in New York City, but neither of whom had him using official resources. He had done a ton of prep and it seemed from his initial emails to me that he was feeling pretty good on Quant, but he was feeling terribly on Verbal! That said, he had not taken any official practice tests (only Kaplan and Princeton Review, boo!), so although he thought he was doing poorly on Verbal, I knew that we didn’t have an accurate sense of where he stood, since 3rd party tests are not a great gauge, especially for Verbal! And I suspected that he was in a better place on Verbal than he realized.
So the first thing I had him do (prior to meeting) was take an official GRE practice test. And guess what? He was indeed in a better place than he thought! Although his Kaplan and PR practice tests were giving him scores like 164Q and between 150 and 155 on Verbal, his first official GRE practice test was 167Q and 157V. Problem almost solved and we hadn’t even met yet!
We met for a single session and focused entirely on Verbal. There were a bunch of things that needed to be addressed, most importantly the mentality or lens through which he was approaching Verbal questions, but overall he was in decent shape. More importantly, I gave him guidance on what he should do after our session. Generally, he needed a better understanding of what to do and how to do it, and he needed to leverage official resources, both as a source of practice questions (especially important for Verbal) and of practice tests. I also encouraged him to just book a GRE and take the test once, even though we had had only 1 session. The previous tutors had made him feel like he was still a long way away from where he needed to be, but I had a feeling he would do really well, and even if he didn’t, I wanted him to see that he was close. I would not have suggested that to everyone. In Dave’s case, however, he didn’t really have timing issues, so I knew that wouldn’t torpedo his first try as it does for so many other test-takers, and he also seemed to have thick skin and a good sense of humor, so I wasn’t too worried about what would happen if the score was not as good as he was hoping for. On his first try he got a 167Q and 162V and decided that that was good enough. He was one and done!
Pivoting to Kennedy, she had taken a Manhattan Prep course but felt “stuck” at a 690 on the GMAT. Even before meeting, however, I was able to glean that she was using mostly unofficial resources and had only taken Manhattan Prep tests. So again, how do we know that she’s really at a 690? Just as with Dave, I had her take an official practice test before our first meeting. The result? 720 49Q 40V. Again, problem almost solved! Kennedy was looking for a 740 or 750, so we weren’t quite there, but we were pretty close! She already had a test booked for a few days after our first scheduled meeting, so I told her to keep that test date and that, given how close she already was, it would be worth a shot.
In our meeting we focused entirely on Verbal: I told her that 49Q is already amazing, that getting to a 50Q is very hard, and that we’d get much more value out of trying to bring her Verbal score up into the mid-40s. We addressed the same “mentality shift” mentioned above and then we worked on CR and especially on SC. On SC, we focused on the reasoning aspect of these questions (for example, the presence of deliberately suboptimal answers and the importance of meaning and logic on SC) and stayed away from getting too in the weeds on grammar. Given that we only had one session before our test, I wanted to cover the “big-ticket items,” the things that would have the most impact on her score and to avoid getting into specific rules or grammar conventions that might apply to only one question on her whole exam.
And again, just as with Dave, I gave her a whole game plan of what to do in the lead-up to her exam, a game plan that included some Reason Test Prep Verbal strategy guides, a healthy diet of official GMAT Verbal questions, and an official practice test. We had actually planned to have a couple more meetings after her first test, but guess what? 750 on the first try! Like Dave, she was one and done!
Now, let me add a few caveats or warnings to all of the above, because it is pretty uncommon for us to see students who need only 1 session! Sometimes 4 or 5 sessions is the magic number, but it is rarely 1! The main thing that both Dave and Kennedy shared is that both were coming in at a higher level than they realized. Just getting them to take official practice tests was in itself a big part of the solution to their perceived problem. They also both lacked an understanding of how to prepare for the tests: what resources to use, how to use them, etc. And they both failed to understand what the Verbal section of the GRE and GMAT are really about: reasoning! With that final piece in place, they were both ready to take their tests.
But the other bit that makes them stand out a little is that they both nailed it on the first try! That is unusual and we can’t take any credit for that! In our experience, most people do NOT do that well on their first attempt and nearly all of the people we work with take the GMAT or GRE multiple times.
Often people really lack the foundation for success on the GMAT or GRE. But sometimes they just suffer from poor overall guidance or a misunderstanding of how to prepare for the tests. In cases such as these, it can sometimes be enough to provide very general direction, along with some targeted strategies that address their fundamental weaknesses, in order to get them to their target score.