Has anybody ever taken a GRE tutoring course?

[Just Jeff]

I'm interested in signing up for Manhattan Prep's tutoring course. I know it's expensive, but the GRE is the weakest part of my PhD application.

 

This course will help me stay motivated and keep on practicing what I need to practice.

 

Any tips or personal experiences with this company?

[powerlifterty16]

i would just buy the manhattan prep books. i bought two of them yesterday and finished one, and just started the othe and they're decent....not perfect, but decent. If you could afford the course, it would be worth it as long as they teach you the material. My sister took a princeton rev course and said it was a waste bc they only taught her how to take the test and didnt teach her concepts, and also their ''tricks'' were common sense anyway.

[Cesare]

Kaplan (or any tutoring service) - waste of money. Just get Magoosh + Manhattan. 

[obviousbicycle]

Kaplan (or any tutoring service) - waste of money. Just get Magoosh + Manhattan. 

 

I totally agree with this.

[juilletmercredi]

I didn't take any courses, but I did teach and tutor SAT prep, which is pretty similar to the GRE tutoring.

Most test prep companies operate on the principle that students with high scores can teach other students with how to do well on the tests they scored well, and Manhattan Prep does that to an extreme extent.  You have to have a score in the 90th percentile or higher to teach for Manhattan Prep.  I'm skeptical though.  I'm a good test taker and a good teacher, but in my experience teaching doesn't necessarily come easily from simply knowing the material.

Also, in my experience with a big, very well known test prep company - when I was teaching test prep, I wasn't teaching anything different from the book.  All the strategies and practice questions were right in that $30 test prep book that you can get from the bookstore.  We didn't teach content - like I wasn't teaching vocabulary words or even how to quickly skim and comprehend; it was all test strategies.  All the practice tests, nowadays, are on the CD-ROM, and the GRE itself releases two practice tests that are very accurate.

So personally, in my experience there are two kinds of students who may benefit from classes and/or individual tutoring:

1) Students whose scores are very low - and by very low, I mean 30-40th percentile.  Or
2) People who are very very busy and are very bad at carving out their own time, 1-4 hours per week, to discipline themselves and study for the exam themselves.

I am of the personal opinion that if your scores are higher than the 50th-60th percentile, test prep is a waste of money.  At that point, what you really need is to hone the strategies you already know and practice them, probably work on speed, perhaps expand your vocabulary a bit.  But if you can score in the 50th+ percentile then you already know the basic stuff you need to know to get a high score, IMO, and the rest is just pushing yourself to practice speed (getting sentence completions down to 30-45 seconds, for example) or increase your vocabulary (by creating flash cards from Barron's list, for example).

[quicksilver]

I'd skip the courses; they don't teach anything that you can't get from books. 

 

Also, in terms of prep materials, I actually liked Barron's best. Others seem to teach to the middle...especially Kaplan and P.R.

Edited October 8, 2013 by quicksilver