Award-Winning GRE Tutors serving Reading

The student and I went over her diagnostic test. it has been two months since we met last, as she took a pause from her studying. We talked about her goals, then spent the first hour of our session focusing on techniques for the verbal section: text completion, sentence equivalence, and reading comp. For homework, she is going to re-do the verbal section, using the strategies that we discussed. Then we moved to math. We did a review of combination and permutation, and talked about what "and/or" means in math. We then started to review some of the math questions she answered incorrectly, and practiced factoring. For homework, she is going to complete a factoring worksheet.

The student completed all of her exponents and roots homework and had only a few questions. She read the rules in the math workbook, but didn't complete the practice problems, so those have been reassigned for homework tonight. Today we did practice problems related to number theory and exponents. It's apparent the homework helped and she's handling exponent questions much better. For homework, she's doing practice sets out of the math workbook.

The student did a great job today! On the vocab, a lot of it is a matter of memorization, but she is still good with using clues from important words in the passage, and even just judging by tone. As for math, we reviewed word problems, and she had only minor issues with them. We'll focus on vocab and more word problems and factoring review next time (in addition to anything else she wants to cover).

The student did well with the verbal today, even though it was difficult. She's progressed a lot on reading, and I suggested that she study vocabulary so she can do the other verbal questions with more confidence.

The student gave me an essay that she wrote to look at and we went over it, talking about grammar, vocabulary, and clarity of message. She is good at presenting a clear argument with evidence, and mostly needs to work on syntax and nailing down English nitty-gritty stuff. She also wrote another essay which we went over. We talked about how to study vocabulary and I recommended she try a computer program. She is going to do a full-length practice test before our next session so we can get a baseline score to work from.

The student had questions from her practice in Algebra over the last week. Her questions gave us lots to discuss. Topics included: - defining variables in terms of other variables, - writing equations, - reducing the number of variables to one so that it can be solved, - "which" refers back to the last thing mentioned, - substituting to reduce the number of variables, - assuming a mystery relationship between quantities A and B to simplify or solve by doing the same thing to each quantity, - trying different kinds of values (positive, 0, negative) in Quantitative Comparison, - fixed total cost and variable cost per person, - total profit and profit per item, - Pythagorean theorem, - coordinates of points, - slope formula, - slope-intercept form, and - solving for the y-intercept (b) by substituting for x, y, and slope (m). The student is making more and more connections on her own!