About a year ago, I hired a Starting Strength coach.

Prior to that, I developed a nagging shoulder injury. BTW, if you've never injured your shoulder, I do not recommend it. Everything from putting on my seatbelt to taking off a T-shirt hurt. An MRI showed I had a partial tear of my rotator cuff, and I didn't really know whether I could continue lifting heavy weights, or what exercises I could safely do. So, since I'd been using the Starting Strength lifts and programming, I sought out one of their coaches, not really knowing what to expect.

You can read my review at the link above, but spoiler: it was a great decision. The coach, Nick, turned out to be knowledgeable but also friendly and easy to work with. Learning details about injury prevention, perfecting my form, and having someone to be accountable to all made my investment feel worthwhile - and my strength went way up despite my injury.

If you're in the fortunate position of being able to consider hiring a GRE coach, I have a few ideas for you about what to look for and what I think GRE tutoring should look like over the course of several sessions.

Desirable Tutor Characteristics

This is kind of like a dating checklist - we don't want to be religious about checking all these boxes, but the more, the merrier:

• demonstrated focus on GRE (as opposed to other tutoring subjects)
• career is focused on test prep 
• experience 
• score (good tutors should be able to score very high)
• friendliness
• responsiveness and communication skills
• patience
• kindness but also willingness to be real with you
• listening skills

I could probably go on here, but notice that many of the qualities that make a good friend make a good tutor.

Tutoring Planning

What I think most people don't realize is it's likely that the biggest benefit of a good GRE tutor is their ability to fine-tune your study plan. It's 2024, and you can watch a video for every single concept and strategy for the GRE, and you can find an overwhelming amount of practice material. What you can't do is watch a video that has a study plan that fits your goal, personality, and time frame, and that can update that study plan as you go to make sure it's on track. 

But a good tutor can do all those things - and at least as of now, a good tutor can do them much better than AI can.

In the beginning of a tutoring engagement, it's important for me to figure out the client's timeframe and score goal, so we can fit everything in. By "everything", I generally mean:

• foundation work (math concepts and vocabulary)
• strategy work (learning and practicing quant and verbal strategies)
• experience building (doing and analyzing lots of questions)
• timing (taking timed sections and tests)

This is where things vary quite a bit. Some people need a lot of time to build foundation; some need much less. What I typically see here in the U.S. is that a client shows up with verbal skills that are stronger than the ones they had in high school and quant skills that are weaker. Before we can get much out of quant tutoring, therefore, it makes sense for them to build those quant foundations outside of tutoring with a personalized quant study plan.

Don't get me wrong - there are some things we can work on immediately with quant (some core strategies), and talking through quant concepts that seem tricky can certainly help. But speaking of lifting weights: if a football player shows up to training camp weighing 145 lbs (~66 kg)., learning the playbook backwards and forwards won't help. He's going to need a lot of strength and conditioning, or he'll get his ass handed to him on the field.

So the initial focus for quant is enabling the client to do that quant "strength and conditioning", i.e., learning and drilling concepts, by themselves - going over every single quant concept with a tutor would take WAY too long. And they can also start memorizing vocabulary. But since most people read perfectly well, we can immediately start on verbal strategy and strategy drilling. Talking through these strategies lets me see what a client is thinking as they work with a question, so I can fine-tune their processes.

Other Stages

Once the client has a strong quant foundation and is on their way to learning a lot of vocab, we mix in more strategies and strategy drills, start to build more experience by doing more questions, and finally move on to more exciting things like taking timed sections and tests. What I usually do is schedule practice tests once a week working backwards from someone's planned test date, so they end up taking about 6 practice tests over that many weeks.

Now that the GRE is short, it's especially helpful for people to plan on taking it 2 or 3 times. You only need one good test, and fewer questions means scores can swing more easily if you get lucky or unlucky.

The entire tutoring process might take about 10 weeks, give or take. A good tutor can of course work with your schedule to give you the biggest bang for your budget and timeframe.

The Bottom Line

Just like any coach, a GRE tutor can add considerable value in terms of providing expert instruction, streamlining your prep, and providing tailored study planning, all of which may help raise your score. If you understand the process of tutoring better and know what to look for in a prospective tutor, it should help you make a better decision if you do opt for tutoring.