Award-Winning GRE Tutors serving Cambridge

Today, we started by reviewing some tricky probability concepts. Then, we talked over permutation/combination basics, and I gave the student some homework so she can push these skills. After that, we continued to forge through the hard math sample problems, looking into the hardest challenges the GRE has to offer. Finally, we brainstormed a few more GRE 'analyze an argument' tasks before talking about the 'analyze an issue' task. The student is strong at brainstorming and can generate ideas quickly, so we'll see how she does on an actual writing assignment this week!

The student and I discussed her independent study of common roots and general vocab needed for the test. We decided that since she is continuing to work on those things on her own and that vocabulary is her greatest struggle with regard to the verbal sections of the test but mostly requires memorization, the best use of our time together is to work on math. The student really requires less help when it comes to doing mathematical equations, but she still often struggles with things that might be called mathematical "reasoning" (for example, recognizing that you are given quantities B & C which seem less important because they can be used to get quantity A which can then be used to solve the equation). However, she is remembering and applying rules we have previously talked about and is definitely steadily improving.

Verbal: discussed essay writing strategies; worked on inferring word meaning from context and identifying argument, and inferring information from text. Math: mean, median, mode; Venn diagrams; distance formula. Good progress. We will look at some specific essay test questions.

Continuing on our topic by topic review of math material we covered fractions, percents, and ratios, paying particular attention to the comparing values type questions. We covered the writing portion of the exam and planned our future sessions. Extra practice for single-blank sentence completion questions and also drills for the percents and ratios topics were provided in the session.

We focused on the quantitative section. Most of all, the student and I focused on permutations and exponents. I think the first step is the hardest part for her, so that's what I want to focus on, setting up problems.

Tonight, the student and I worked through practice problems similar in style and concept to what will likely appear on the GRE. In advance of our session, she worked through a few sets of problems dealing with Arithmetic, Fractions/Decimals, and Percentages, and we worked through those problems that caused difficulty together. We focused on the best way to initially set up the problem, as well as following through step-by-step in order to catch any mistakes made due to arithmetic or conceptual errors. She will continue to work through more algebra practice on her own ahead of our next session.