One-on-one GRE tutoring for scores that open doors.

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

For example, if you’ve never touched a GRE 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.

Yes, we definitely offer GRE tutoring. Our founder has taught GRE students since 2001, and the GRE has been a huge part of our work since then. Our company name is admittedly a little bit misleading, but “GMAT, GRE, EA, & MBA Admissions Ninja” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Anyway, the nice thing about the GRE is that it tests many of the same concepts as the GMAT, and much of our GMAT expertise translates comfortably to the GRE. Several of our tutors have earned perfect scores on the GRE, including our founder, who has done so on several occasions.

As a starting point, we expect our GRE 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. Before you begin tutoring, your GMAT tutor will dig into every piece of data about your performance, including assigning diagnostic homework. From there, they’ll begin to identify the factors that are holding back your score, and you’ll work together to fix those roadblocks.

Keep in mind that the GRE 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.

In many ways, the heart of our tutoring is always the same: we look deeply into our students’ minds, and figure out what’s REALLY holding them back from their target scores – even if it’s not something that you might expect.

When they study on their own, test-takers tend to focus on concrete issues such as math formulas, but in many cases, their struggles come from more subtle behaviors, such as rushing through easy questions, getting stubborn on harder questions, failing to focus on the author’s purpose in an RC passage, or struggling to eliminate distracting thoughts during an exam.

In other words, we pride ourselves on making deep diagnoses of our students’ strengths, weaknesses, and mindsets, regardless of which exam they’re taking.

That said, the tests are obviously very different from each other in key ways, so we can’t reasonably approach them in exactly the same ways. For example, GMAT and EA quant questions often require deeper layers of reasoning than GRE questions, so we emphasize different approaches when we’re tutoring those exams. You’ll have to be great at solving “quant puzzles” if you want an elite GMAT or EA score, but fundamental quant content will usually get you a bit farther on the GRE.

We could go on and on with examples. The bottom line: our tutoring approach is inevitably different for each exam, but we always fight to understand our students deeply, and seek personalized solutions to their struggles – even if their struggles aren’t necessarily what they expected.

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.

In our post-COVID world, it’s exceedingly rare for our students to prefer in-person tutoring sessions, but we’re certainly open to it.

If you’re interested in in-person tutoring, check out our tutors’ bios to see if any of our instructors live near you. If one of them seems like the right fit geographically and you decide to contact us for tutoring, just let us know that you prefer in-person tutoring, and we’ll do our best to work out the logistics.

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, we’re happy to provide you with each one.

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 more than 60 countries, as well as nearly every state in the U.S.

It depends on your exact weaknesses, but odds are good that we’ll be able to help you, even if you’ve already suffered through a long, painful relationship with the GRE.

We love searching for creative, interesting ways to help students improve, and if you’re starting to think that you’re completely hopeless, we’ll probably really enjoy finding new ways for you to approach your studies. New challenges make tutoring fun for us, so we’re always excited to meet prospective students who are in unique and difficult situations.

Think about it this way: if you’ve already been through a few prep courses—or if you’ve spent hours hunched over a stack of test-prep books—then it’s likely that you’ve seen nearly every “standard” test-prep technique in existence. For whatever reason, the one-size-fits-all approach employed by test-prep companies isn’t right for you.

That happens. A lot. A majority of our students have taken the GRE at least twice before contacting us for tutoring, so we’re accustomed to seeing students who have been thoroughly beaten down by the test. At times, we realize that we’re the tutors of last resort: if typical test-prep techniques aren’t working for you, we might be creative enough to come up with something new that helps you achieve a breakthrough.

Again, no two students are exactly alike, and that’s exactly what makes tutoring compelling for us. If there’s a way for you to improve your score, we like to think that we’ll be able to find it—even if our techniques end up being unorthodox.

So even if you’ve struggled mightily in the past, there might be a path forward for you. If we don’t think that we can help you, we promise to be 100% honest about it. But if there’s a way for you to improve your score, we promise to do everything we can to find it, and we’ll probably come up with ideas that very few tutors would think of. Contact us if you want to discuss your exact situation in more detail.

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?