GMAT and GRE are regarded as few of the most reputed standardizes tests that exist today and scoring well in these tests can make or break dreams of thousands of students who seek admission in the top Universities. However, our education system is not such that scoring well in these exams will come naturally to students and therefore, a preparation which is distinct from the way courses are taught in schools is required. One can either enroll in a classroom-based preparation course or can find an Online GMAT Tutor. In any case, you need a proper strategy to clear these exams with flying colors.
We recently Interviewed Charles Bibilos, the founder of GMAT Ninja to know more about the world of GMAT and GRE and how students can raise their scores in these tests.
Charles, Thank You for talking with us. Kindly tell us what inspired you to go ahead with the idea of Gmat Ninja.
I’d love to say that I had some grand vision for a different sort of GMAT tutoring company, but the honest truth is that my entire test-prep tutoring career was mostly an accident.
The short-ish version is that I used to be a professional dancer, and I worked in restaurants and bars to support my dance habit. In 2001, I was invited to join a dance company that would devour most of my time, but still paid basically nothing. So I had to quit my restaurant job, and I had no idea what I would do instead.
As luck would have it, the manager of the restaurant I worked in happened to be married to the manager of a big test-prep center in the neighborhood. It was perfect: I already loved teaching, and test-prep tutoring was flexible enough to fit my goofy schedule.
After a year or two at that company, I started tutoring independently, partly because it paid a bit better, and partly because I wanted to develop my own test-prep teaching methods. I only taught GRE and GMAT part-time until 2008, when I realized that teaching was way more fun than the other things I had done for a living, and I decided to concentrate solely on tutoring, primarily for the GRE and the GMAT.
I started tutoring under the GMAT Ninja name in 2009, and even that was an accident. One of my test-prep students joked that I was basically a ninja with the GMAT, so I bought the gmatninja.com URL just to make the guy laugh. And then it kind of stuck.
What were the initial challenges that you faced in your endeavor?
For most of its existence, GMAT Ninja was just a one-man test-prep tutoring company. So the biggest challenge I faced was the fact that I couldn’t keep up with demand for GMAT and GRE tutoring – and obviously, that’s a great “problem” to have.
That created a second problem: most of my GMAT students could only meet during evenings and weekends, so I didn’t have a whole lot of free evenings. From a lifestyle point of view, it wasn’t perfect.
In 2016, I finally started hiring and training new GRE and GMAT tutors, so that obviously has helped us keep up with demand for our services. And then the internet has helped us with the second problem: we still tutor quite a bit on evenings and weekends, but more MBA applicants have flexible work schedules now, and we do nearly all of our GRE and GMAT tutoring online — a large percentage of our students are in Europe and the Middle East, and the time zone difference helps us tutor online during more reasonable hours. So now our lives are more balanced, and I think that makes us better tutors.
Why do you think the students need additional coaching for competitive exams like GMAT, GRE etc.? Please highlight the deficiencies in our current education system.
The biggest challenge with the GMAT is that it’s not really a knowledge-based test at all. Most people pursuing an elite MBA have done well in school, so they’re good at absorbing and regurgitating a bunch of information. Usually, our GRE and GMAT students are great at memorizing stuff and cramming for tests at the last minute.
But that simply doesn’t work on the GMAT. The GMAT quant section, for example, is built on a foundation of 9th- and 10th-grade math. So for most people, there’s not much to memorize. The same is true on the GMAT verbal section: a little bit of grammar knowledge helps, but 95% of the battle is how you read and apply logic to what you read. You can’t cram for that type of exam, and very few education systems are designed to help students get better at the reasoning and problem-solving skills that are essential for the GMAT.
The other problem is that both the GMAT and GRE are adaptive tests, which means that if you get a question right, you’ll see a harder question; if you get a question wrong, you’ll see easier ones. Your score is basically a weighted average of the difficulty levels of the questions you encounter on both the GMAT and the GRE. In other words, your score is based mostly on which questions you miss – not on how many you miss. So if you make sloppy mistakes on easier questions, you’ll never see the harder questions, and your score will plummet in a hurry.
A lot of GMAT and GRE test-takers have never faced that type of exam, and they don’t know how to manage their process, their behavior, their mindset, or their time in order to avoid those sloppy errors on easier questions. Almost without exception, education systems don’t prepare students well for this aspect of adaptive exams like the GRE and GMAT.
How does GMAT Ninja polish students before they take some of the most reputed exams in the world?
The most important thing is that we address all of the behavioral and psychological aspects of the GMAT and GRE head-on. The math and grammar content of the GMAT and GRE isn’t usually the limiting factor for MBA applicants. Most of our incoming GMAT and GRE students have already learned the core content, and there’s something else holding them back from their target scores.
At that point, our job is to get inside their heads, and figure out where their thought process is running off the rails – and I think we do that better than any other GRE or GMAT tutors out there. We dig for the underlying causes of our incoming students’ underperformance on the GMAT – sometimes the problem is a student’s underlying reading skills, or something strange in the way they structure their notes, or a refusal to check for sloppy quant errors because they’re too worried about time or because they’re undisciplined in general. Or maybe the problem is sleep deprivation, or test anxiety, or something else entirely.
Every problem has a cause, and we’ll always find that cause, even if it’s not something a GMAT student would ever suspect.
I’ve been teaching GMAT and GRE students for almost two decades now, and it’s the behavioral and psychological aspects of the test that keep it interesting. Every student walks in with a different set of behavioral and psychological barriers, and our job is to break those down, and build better, stronger habits that will allow our students to reach their potential on the GMAT and GRE. And that process looks different for every student we tutor.
Please give us more details on the way your platform prepares students for different examinations.
People love to ask us about our “curriculum” or our “GMAT study plan”, and those things don’t really exist in the ways that GMAT or GRE test-takers often expect. The whole point of test-prep tutoring is that we’re 100% flexible, and we tailor absolutely everything to the strengths and weaknesses of each student. Yes, of course, we need every student pursuing a particular score – say, a 700 on the GMAT – to master certain things. But the path we take to get there is different for each GMAT student.
We also pride ourselves on being brutally honest, and that begins with our expectations for our GMAT and GRE students’ homework loads. These exams are all about building strong habits of mind, and that requires a lot of dedicated work between tutoring sessions. So depending on the exact situation, we ask most of our GMAT and GRE students to complete 15 hours of homework per week. That ensures that we maximize their progress toward their score goal, and that they don’t languish for months without seeing an improvement on the GMAT or GRE.
We’re also very data-driven, so we track our students’ GRE and GMAT homework results carefully, and continually provide students with updates on what their results mean. We work hard to be the most versatile GRE and GMAT tutors in the market, but if we see a skill deficiency that a student can’t seem to overcome, our job is to be honest about it, and help students make an informed decision about how to move forward. We’re nice people, but sugar-coating doesn’t help anybody improve their GRE or GMAT score, or get into a top MBA program.
Any suggestions you would like to give to students who wish to clear these examinations with decent scores?
My biggest piece of advice is to start preparing for the GMAT or GRE a full year before you plan to submit your applications to MBA programs. That sounds crazy, but if you’re pursuing a top-10 MBA, you’ll ideally want to give yourself plenty of time to network and visit MBA campuses before you start writing essays — and then writing the applications themselves takes far more time than most applicants expect. So you’ll want to finish up the GMAT or GRE 4-6 months before you plan to submit your applications.
And then the GRE and GMAT often take students far longer than they expect. Again, most people pursuing elite MBAs are great at cramming for tests, but that’s not helpful for these exams. Plenty of students can succeed with a couple of months of GMAT tutoring – and others don’t need any GMAT tutoring at all – but if you’re really serious about getting into the best MBA programs possible, you’ll want to be prepared to spend quite a few months studying for the GMAT.
If you don’t end up needing that time, great: you can go on vacation or something. But last-minute cramming doesn’t work on the GRE or GMAT, and the odds of success are much higher when you plan ahead. Ideally way ahead.
