If your goal is to succeed on the GMAT or a serious standardized test, my biggest piece of advice is: use Tara.
I started my MBA application process with the lofty goal of being accepted by a highly selective business school. Unfortunately, my first GMAT practice exam put me nowhere near the range of most applicants to those schools (620). On top of that, I was a philosophy major in undergrad, so I knew the questions about my quant skills could potentially be major marks against me for the business school admission committees. To that end, I realized that a huge portion of their assessment of my quantitative skills would come from the GMAT. As such, doing well became very important to me. Again, I did not have a math background and was scoring well below my goals on practice tests.
To help me, I figured I needed someone who knew the GMAT inside and out and someone who had succeeded on it before to show me how to be most successful. I looked online and found stellar reviews for Tara, and called him that day. He was very flexible with timing, and as I worked full-time, was willing to meet me at nights to help me prepare.
Between working full-time and taking grad school classes, I told Tara that I only had time for 6 1-hour sessions, once per week. I told him that I was scoring between 41 and 42 on the quantitative section and asked him to honestly tell me if I could significantly improve that score in 8 weeks. Tara told me he would help me work as hard as I was prepared to work to achieve the highest score possible. With his encouragement I decided to really put in some time studying and signed up for six sessions with him.
15 minutes into the first session I already could tell what a game changer Tara was going to be. Within those first few minutes he had assessed my quantitative knowledge and figured out where the holes in my capabilities were. By the end of an hour, he had written out 8+ pages of clear notes and strategies that proved invaluable in my prep for the GMAT. These were not the typical rules that books take you through in 500 pages, where you waste time re-reading strategies you already know– these were clear, concise, pragmatic strategies that helped fill gaps in my knowledge that were directly applicable to individual GMAT questions. Most of what I saw were rules and techniques that I had never even heard of before, but that helped me on GMAT questions.
That night, after one session, my GMAT practice already felt significantly easier. Each week Tara would focus on several of my weaknesses, using a combination of lecturing, doing practice problems together, independent practice work, and taking actual tests together to help make sure I would be comfortable with any sort of question the GMAT could throw at me.
And every week, for all six weeks, I left with a packet of new strategies that gave me ways to attack problems that I had previously thought I would never be able to answer. Tara offered simple techniques that allowed me to answer supposedly hard questions quite easily. I could feel my progress accelerating as I became excited for the date of GMAT.
Tara was so thorough in his teaching of number properties and strategies to use on any and all GMAT questions, that by the end of my studying I had trouble finding questions that I no longer knew how to do. Through all six weeks, he continued to give me new tricks and knowledge that I had not previously had.
Throughout our lessons, I came to view Tara almost as a super computer– I could not find a question that gave him any trouble at all, or that even caused him a moment of hesitation. And yet despite this intellectual prowess, not once did he seem condescending, arrogant or judgemental of my significant quantitative shortcomings. To the contrary, he was quite disarming and actually a lot of fun to work with. He was very supportive and continued to give me confidence as I got closer and closer to the big day– he was just a genuinely cool guy. I actually chose to meet a final time with Tara the week before my GMAT, and once again he gave me about 6-7 new strategies, 5 of which I used exactly as they were taught to me on the test 10 days later.
When the day of the test arrived, I spent the hour before the test reading through Tara’s notes for the 100th time. I was nervous, but as soon as I actually began the test, the nerves dissipated as, question after question, I kept going back to strategies Tara taught me. I found myself, on almost every question, going back to an explicit strategy we had covered together.
I could not believe my results: an 8 on Integrated Reasoning, and a 49 Quant. Combined (with a 44 verbal) it was a 760 overall score (99th percentile), far above my target score. Looking back I know this was a direct result of my work with Tara. I am very appreciative and incredibly thankful for Tara and the time we spent together, and I could not recommend him more strongly! Thank you for everything Tara!