Certified Tutors From Emmaus Bible College

This was my first meeting with the student and a great start! We reviewed her homework assignment which was basically using foil to solve problems with radicals in them and then using the LCD to solve for x. She was familiar with foil, so I mostly helped her in her understanding of radicals. Same thing for the LCD problems, I just reviewed how to add/subtract fractions and cross multiply. Overall, she was quite comfortable with the material and she will be completing her hw. I offered to help if she needed assistance and also, I asked her to send me any old material that was going to be covered on her upcoming exams so that I can help her prepare for her exams. We will be meeting twice a week and our next session will be on Monday!

We completed areas of parallelograms and triangles. Then we started homework, areas of trapezoids, rhombuses and kites. The student had his exam. The student has no results yet. He understands the material.

It was a relatively calm easygoing session. We went over some angles and triangles at first again, then moved on to probability. He remembered how to solve congruent angles pretty well, but the concept of probability was more difficult to grasp. I tried to simplify it and make it relatable by using the chance of rain and the chance a sports team wins and showing how they are or are not independent by multiplying the two separately. We have two more sessions before his final next Friday, so I hope to cover as much ground in those sessions. He is usually able to solve the problem once I tell him how to set it up and he just needs to be able to set up the equations himself.

The student and I began working on her preparation for her final exam. I had her start with a few problems on continuously compounded growth and decay. She needs to remember to include a negative sign for the rate if it is a decay problem. Otherwise, she is familiar with these problems from the last chapter. We then went on to review her trig chapters. She started with conversion between radians and degrees, and unit conversions of equations for linear and angular velocity. She then did some work on trig equations, and identifying them as identities, conditionals, or contradictions. I advised her to look for equations in the quadratic form and to always set them equal to zero and use quadratic factoring. Finally, for the others that are most likely identities, I advised her to try to convert other trig functions to relations of sines and cosines. She just needs to follow the rules for combining fractions, making the denominators the same and then combining the numerators. Afterwards, she should see if she can use any Pythagorean identities to convert any trig functions with squares. She had trouble with these at first, but was able to do a couple more smoothly after we had practiced a few together. Most important is that she tries to identify the kind of problem when she starts and to figure out the general strategy she has at hand to solve this kind of problem. If she thinks about it ahead of time, she is more likely to start down the right path and not get confused. We'll continue practicing the trig concepts she has studied as she reviews for her final.

The student completed a review and practice of adding, subtracting, and multiplying decimal values. She has a strong grasp on long division, as evident from her homework. Her multiplication skills are also very strong.

In this session, the student and I started by going over the two quantitative practice sections she completed for homework. She did fairly well overall, but had some issues with the data interpretation and quantitative comparison sections. We reviewed some of the general strategies she can use for the quantitative comparison section, and I believe she will benefit from focusing on these tactics in her next practice sections. We also talked a bit about the data interpretation, although she felt pretty good about these questions after reading the explanations. We talked a bit about the essay section of the GRE, but she feels pretty good about the two essay types. We ended our session by going over a few vocabulary words she wanted to clarify. For next time, she will set a date for her GRE, complete a full practice exam and also complete a practice set on rates that I will send her.