The highest standard in GMAT tutoring.

Nearly everybody asks this question, and our answer is always the same: it depends.

For example, if you’ve never touched a GMAT prep book but dream of admission to Harvard or Stanford, then you might need more tutoring than somebody who is just fine-tuning her approach after months of self-study. If you’ve taken only a single practice test and your score was significantly lower than your goal, then you might need a whole lot of time with a tutor.

Everybody learns at their own pace, some people are better about doing homework than others, and some people have set more challenging goals than others.

So we know that the answer is unsatisfying, but until we know a lot more about you and what you’re trying to achieve, we can’t predict how much tutoring you’ll need. Sorry.

You probably know what we’re going to say here: it depends on your talent, your study habits, your starting score, and your exact strengths and weaknesses.

Everybody wants to hear us guarantee massive score improvements, but the honest truth is that it can be really, really hard to make a big leap on the GMAT, EA, or GRE.

For example, very few people ever manage to increase their GMAT scores by more than 200 points. Don’t get us wrong: we’ve seen it happen a number of times. One of Charles’s favorite students went from a 380 to a 670, but it took him a long time; that particular student had a limited budget and didn’t rely too heavily on his GMAT tutor, but he had one heck of a work ethic. Mike’s very first GMAT student improved from a 380 to a 630 after a few months of tutoring. So it happens, but it certainly isn’t easy.

Also, keep in mind that it’s a lot harder to improve your score if you already have a reasonably high score. A 150-point improvement might be a realistic GMAT goal for somebody who starts in the 400s (we’ve seen this happen quite a few times), but it’s a tall order for somebody whose initial test score is above 600. If you’re starting in the 600s, even a 100-point improvement will require some incredibly heavy lifting from both you and your GMAT tutor. Yes, we see it happen fairly often, but it isn’t easy to do.

We pride ourselves on brutal honesty, so if you’re interested in working hard to achieve your goals, tell us your story here, and we’ll respond with an assessment of your odds of achieving your goals on whichever exam you’re taking — without any sugar-coating or empty promises.

As a starting point, we expect our GMAT students to complete about 15 hours of homework per week: roughly two hours per weekday and three or four hours per weekend day, depending on your exact situation.

More hours than that can easily lead to careless errors and bad habits, and fewer hours might prevent you from making progress as quickly as you’d like.

Again, everybody is different, but if you decide to work with us, be prepared for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 hours per week of heavy lifting, ideally spread somewhat evenly through the week. If you’re not prepared to work hard toward your goals, then we probably aren’t the right tutors for you.

The structure of tutoring depends entirely on each student’s strengths, weaknesses, interests, and needs.

Keep in mind that the GMAT is extremely nuanced. We’ll look for the most efficient ways to help you gain points, and that inevitably means different things for different people.

We require two-hour tutoring sessions in most cases, simply because most students need a little bit of time to get fully “warmed up” for learning, and we always have tons of ground to cover. Sessions longer than two hours usually suffer from diminishing returns, though we have tutored a few intense students who manage to survive three or four hours of non-stop tutoring fun.

So in very rare cases, we’re willing to consider longer or shorter session lengths, but it’s safest to assume that two-hour sessions will be the best way to move forward efficiently.

In most cases, we strongly recommend regular, weekly tutoring sessions. If you’re doing the required 15 hours per week of homework, a two-hour tutoring session is going to fly by really, really quickly — and anything less than weekly sessions is unlikely to give us enough time to address the weaknesses that we see in your homework results.

For students who can afford to spend time doing extra homework, we’re open to meeting more frequently, but we definitely don’t recommend anything less than weekly sessions if you’re serious about making progress quickly.

We offer dozens of sets of practice questions that we’ve developed over the years, but these sets are only designed as supplements for students who need extra work on certain question types. All of these exams have their own unique question styles, and there’s absolutely no substitute for using official materials.

So the answer is yes, we do provide our own practice materials to our students. But we would be crappy tutors if we pretended that our materials were somehow better than the materials developed by the people who actually write each of the exams.

Yes, but please be aware that there is much higher demand for tutoring during evenings and weekends, so you might need to schedule sessions well ahead of time, especially during the peak of MBA admissions season. We often have a lengthy waiting list for evening and weekend tutoring sessions, so please plan ahead if you possibly can.

Of course! Mention it in your intake form and we’ll arrange it.

If you want some instant references from people who have worked with us, feel free to check out our reviews on TrustPilot or Yelp (including many reviews that have been cruelly and inexplicably suppressed). We have hundreds of five-star reviews across the internet that we’re happy to point you towards.

Nearly all of our students meet with us online, usually via Skype, Zoom, or Google Meet. We’ve offered online tutoring since 2009, and by 2019, roughly 99% of our tutoring was conducted online.

During an online tutoring session, you’ll be able to see a (virtual or physical) dry-erase board and anything we type on our computer screen, so the experience is a pretty solid replacement for a live, one-on-one tutoring session.

The only things you need for an online tutoring session are a good internet connection, a webcam, and free video conferencing software (Skype, Google Meet, Zoom, or whatever you and your tutor prefer to use). We also recommend a decent headset, to minimize audio interference during our session.

A few nuances are inevitably lost via the internet — for example, we can always see your reactions, but we generally can’t see what you’re writing down in your notes — but we’re very accustomed to tutoring students online, and it works really, really well.

Our MBA admissions consulting services are also offered online. We have worked remotely with applicants in dozens of countries worldwide, as well as locations throughout the United States.

Sorry, that’s not something that has ever really made sense to us, for all sorts of reasons.

For starters, score guarantees often feel like a sales gimmick, and they distort the student-teacher relationship in an important way: all of this works best when we approach this as a partnership, not a sales transaction.

If you’re struggling on the GMAT, EA, or GRE, odds are good that you’re having a hard time figuring out the underlying causes of your struggles – and we need to work WITH you to identify and fix your weaknesses. If you’re just sitting back and waiting for us to give you a “guaranteed” solution, that’s not nearly as likely to be successful.

Second, if we were to offer some sort of score guarantee, we would instantly be incentivized to “cherry-pick” our students. We’d avoid tougher cases, and that’s ridiculous and counterproductive for everybody. If we think that you’re going to have a really, really hard time achieving your goals, we’re going to tell you that honestly – and then if you still want to strive to achieve them, we’ll do everything humanly possible to help.

Frankly, we love working with “long-shot” students who face all sorts of headwinds. And those engagements aren’t at all compatible with score guarantees.

We can 100% guarantee a few things, though. Our tutors will obsessively do everything they can to help you, and we only hire tutors who are freaking phenomenal – in our most recent hiring rounds, we extended offers to four tutors out of more than 3000 applicants, and we very thoroughly train and support the elite tutors that we do hire. And we can 100% guarantee that they’ll be honest with you about your progress – even if it means telling you things that you don’t want to hear.

Unfortunately, we can’t promise that we’ll be able to answer questions from applicants who have no interest in hiring us as their tutor or admissions consultant. We’ll try to help if we can, but please don’t be offended if we don’t respond to requests for (unpaid) advice, particularly during the test-taking and MBA admissions frenzy that runs from June through January each year.

We do, however, regularly respond to questions in the comment sections of our YouTube videos.

Life gets tricky sometimes, and we do everything we can to accommodate reasonable schedule changes. But the reality is that our lives get much harder when students cancel a few hours before a tutoring session: it means that we’re able to accommodate far fewer students in any given week, and that’s bad for everybody.

The bottom line is that we’re much happier if everybody just shows up to their appointments as scheduled. If your life is suddenly interrupted by a terrible act of nature (swine flu, subway fires, blizzards, capybara attacks, internet outages), we’ll cut you some slack. Otherwise, if you’re just canceling for work or personal reasons without giving us a good 48 hours’ notice, we think it’s fair to ask that you pay for the slot that you occupied, since 48 hours usually doesn’t give us enough time to offer that slot to anybody else. Sound reasonable?