How Our Course Works

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Great GRE scores do not come from a few test-taking strategies. They come from a thorough understanding of the content of the exam. Learning this content well is not something that can be done over the course of a weekend. But anyone can — even those who are starting from scratch.

Our course starts by assuming you know nothing.

Everything is laid out for you as if you haven’t done math or read college-level material in years. Each class focuses on a select topic, such as Geometry, and opens with a thorough discussion of its most simple, fundamental concepts. Bit by bit, we gradually explore all the wrinkles associated with that topic, so that you can solve problems involving sophisticated nuances, not just easy ones.

At the end of each lesson, and as part of your weekly homework assignments, you’ll find a treatment of every rare and advanced concept tested by the GRE. You won’t find these topics discussed anywhere else. We are the only company that covers them. We know that some of our students only need help solving the most difficult questions — the questions that determine who scores above the 90th percentile. We’ve made sure that our course teaches everything, so that students in this position get all the support they need.

Shawn reviewing arcs and sectors at our Dupont Circle location

To keep things simple, we discuss everything in language that’s easy to understand and focus on smart strategies for every level of material. In designing our course, we were determined to make our classes helpful for everyone, not just math geeks and savants. We are GRE specialists who have spent our entire professional careers making math accessible to students who hate it. What we teach is the culmination of more than three decades of daily classroom instruction. No matter how difficult a topic may be, we walk you through each concept, step by step, to ensure that everything makes sense.

Read our GRE course syllabus

Along the way, we sprinkle in hundreds of shortcuts and tricks that you won’t find anywhere else. We know that time is a major concern for many test-takers, so we’ve included every time-saving strategy out there to help you “beat the clock”. We don’t care how well you think you know a particular math or verbal topic. These shortcuts will save you valuable minutes, no matter what your current skill level may be.

To complement our content-oriented approach, we devote an entire lesson to something we call “Plan B” strategies. A “Plan B” strategy is a strategy that can help you deduce a correct answer when you don’t know how to solve a problem. Such “tricks of the trade” are typically encountered in strategy-based GRE courses. No other course, however, features a collection like the one we’ve put together. We’ve got all of the tricks, not just a few.

Finally, we assign ten hours of homework each week to ensure that our students master what we teach. This homework consist of lessons, practice sets, and videos from Master Key to the GRE — our proprietary 7-volume guide for the GRE — as well as weekly computerized practice exams. Great GRE scores require hard work. Whatever your goals may be, these assignments will help you adopt good habits and provide you the structure you need to achieve those goals.

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