Online GMAT Tutoring

As the technology improves and as online tutoring becomes more effective, more and more people are choosing to work with tutors remotely, via Skype or some other online meeting platform. However, finding a tutor, a daunting task under any circumstances, is all the more difficult when you are looking for someone who you will be working with remotely and who you will likely never meet in person. You need to find someone who not only is an expert teacher and master of the GMAT but also has the experience and knowledge about how to work with students effectively in an online format.

The Move to Online
First it is worth mentioning that online tutoring is not for everyone so it is worth first considering whether it is the right option for you. I wrote another post in which I discussed some of the pros and cons of online tutoring so you may want to start there. There are some students who I have worked with locally in New York City who actually prefer the convenience of meeting online, but there are others for whom in-person tutoring is clearly more effective so it is worth considering how the local options would compare to the online ones. That said, obviously there are some people who have very few local options so online tutoring allows people in this situation to find GMAT tutors all over the world and indeed many of the students I have worked with are situated in far off places like New Zealand, Moscow, Saudi Arabia, etc., where local GMAT experts may be hard to find. For some people online GMAT tutoring is just the only option.

How to Find a GMAT Tutor vs. How To Choose a GMAT Tutor
There is a difference between finding a tutor and choosing a tutor, the latter probably being the more difficult of the two. And there are some considerations that are specific to the search for an online tutor that are worthy of mention, so the below discussion will consider both of those issues.

Finding the Tutor
In terms of finding an online GMAT tutor, obviously online searches are a good place to start. Someone who does a lot of online tutoring is likely to have a good online presence, so there is a good chance that you will find someone with a fair amount of experience tutoring the GMAT remotely.

Contacting one of the big GMAT prep companies is another option, but there are some disadvantages to that approach. First of all, since these companies obviously try to pair students with tutors who are located in the same area, teachers who work for major test prep companies are less likely to have the same level of online tutoring experience. I know this in part because I used to work for a major GMAT-prep provider, and although I taught classes online occasionally, I only had 1 or 2 online tutoring experiences through the company. Now that I work independently I do a ton of online tutoring (it’s probably 50% of all the tutoring that I do). The other obvious drawback of going through one of the major GMAT-prep providers is that you are essentially paying a middle-man a very large premium, one that you can avoid paying if you can find someone on your own.

In addition to the above, you could also use the popular GMAT forums like BeatTheGMAT and GMATClub, since tutors who have an online presence and who do online tutoring often post or even blog on the forums.

Choosing the Tutor
If you choose to go with a tutor who comes through a major test prep company, there probably isn’t too much “choosing” that is going to happen. The best you can probably hope for is that after a session or two, if you don’t have confidence in the person you were assigned or if you just don’t click, you can probably request to be switched to another tutor.

Assuming, however, that you find some tutors who are independent of the major companies, your first step should probably be to take a look at their respective websites and glean as much as you can from them. Do you like the approach they espouse? Do they have a blog with information that you find extremely useful? Are there legitimate-seeming reviews, such as on Yelp or Google that seem to indicate that the person has had success with other students. This last bit is probably not the most useful consideration because there are probably ways to fabricate those reviews, but the websites themselves and the information that is on them should allow you to start to narrow down the field.

After contacting the possible tutors and verifying rates, availability, etc., you can ask to have a conversation or even skype chat with the ones who you think might be a good fit. This is another advantage to searching for an online tutor. Though I would personally be willing to have a skype chat with a potential local student, it just usually doesn’t happen. A phone call or even a few emails back and forth is usually all that transpires between me and my local students before I meet them. But perhaps because the remote tutoring is going to happen online anyway, it seems very natural and is indeed very common (at least in my experience) for tutor and prospective student to “meet” online, usually via skype, prior to commencing actual tutoring. Again, this just seems to be a natural outgrowth of the fact that I will ultimately just be meeting the person online anyway, but it is very reasonable to ask a prospective online GMAT tutor if they would be willing to have a short chat via Skype in order to get more information. And a “face-to-face” meeting over Skype will give you a better gauge for whether the tutor is the right fit than will a phone conversation.

Asking Questions
Once you set up skype chats with your potential tutors, you enter the most important phase: the vetting process. People seem to underestimate what you can learn just by having a conversation with a potential tutor and asking some pointed questions. Obviously you can get answers to the questions that you actually have, but you can do more than that. You should also be able to gauge how competent and experienced the tutor is just by the way he or she answers the questions. If you only plan to speak to one potential tutor, it may be harder to do this, but if you plan to talk to 2 or 3, then the different ways in which they answer the questions will tell you a lot. And it doesn’t even need to be the answer itself that is so important. The ease and sincerity with which they respond will be illustrative, especially if you have the opportunity to meet a few potential tutors and can compare the experiences. And again, being able to actually see the tutor via skype or other conferencing platform makes it easier to get a sense for the level of confidence you have in the person and their abilities.

Below is a list of potential questions that you could ask, not only because you want answers to these specific questions, but also because the way the potential tutor answers them will tell you something about their methodology, experience, confidence, etc. There are some general questions that would be applicable for any GMAT tutor search and then I follow that with a list of questions that you may consider asking when looking specifically for an online GMAT tutor.

General Questions
What are the factors that, in your opinion, most determine how a person ultimately scores on the GMAT?

How do you gauge what a person needs most to improve his or her score and how do you structure things based on that?

What materials and practice tests do you use? (I would be wary of any tutor who doesn’t rely mostly on official resources, perhaps supplemented by their own materials and possibly a few resources from the major test prep companies)

Can you give me a sense for what the overall game plan might look like and how that plays out over the course of the sessions?

What is a typical session like and how do you string things together from one session to the next?

How do you deal with poor time management issues (i.e., not finishing the sections on time)?

Specific Questions Relevant to an Online GMAT Tutor Search
What do you think are the differences (perhaps advantages and disadvantages) of in-person sessions vs. online sessions and how do you deal with some of the drawbacks of the online format?

What platform do you use (i.e., Skype or some other web conferencing software) and can you describe how it works?

Can we view questions together on the screen?

How will you get a look at my practice tests?

Are you able to write directly on the screen? If so, how, and do your students typically write on the screen as well?

If I am not writing on the screen, how do you deal with the fact that you cannot see what I am doing?

Is it possible to save the work that we do (perhaps as PDFs or screenshots) so that I can have the notes from our sessions?

Is it possible to video record the lessons? (This may seem like a bold question but I do record my sessions for my students and the functionality for that is readily available)

There is really no right answer to most of the above questions, but any good GMAT tutor should have thought through all of the issues alluded to in the more general questions countless times and be able to give you knowledgeable and confident answers with relative ease. And the tutor’s answers to the more specific questions about the online format should also give you a sense for how the online sessions would work and how much experience the person has working with students online. I have tutored students who had previously worked with other online tutors, and, believe it or not, in some of these cases the student and tutor could not even see each other or what they were doing during the sessions (in one case the tutor was working with the student over the phone). Needless to say, that is not ideal.

Additionally, as mentioned above, if you speak to more than one GMAT tutor you will be able to compare the way they answer the questions to see not only who you see more eye-to-eye with in terms of their overall philosophy but also who seems to have a better general level of experience and expertise. And at the end of the day, if you choose to work with a particular tutor and realize pretty quickly that the person is not what they initially seemed, feel free to continue your search for a better and more experienced tutor (this is one reason why it is smart not to commit to and pay for a certain number of sessions up front).

Is online GMAT tutoring effective? Is it as effective as in-person GMAT tutoring? The amount of online tutoring that I do has been steadily increasing in recent years and it is now at the point that I am consistently doing more online tutoring than live tutoring, despite the fact that I live and tutor in New York City, the biggest GMAT market in the world. In fact many of the people who I tutor online are in New York City! So I wanted to devote a post or two to an honest evaluation of the effectiveness of online GMAT tutoring.

Before I begin, it is worth mentioning that online tutoring can be done well or it can be done badly. There are technologies and best practices that can make it really effective but I have heard stories from some of the people I have tutored about online tutoring experiences that were pretty shocking (like doing it over the phone with no video whatsoever!). So online GMAT tutoring can be better or worse depending on how it is done, but my analysis is going to be based on my own experience and will be colored by the lens through which I view it (and I have been doing it for a long time so I have developed certain strategies that I believe make it very effective).

THE CONS

Let me begin with the cons. The biggest drawback is that if the student does not have a writing tablet, the tutor cannot see what the person is doing in real time. This is not much of an issue for Verbal since people tend not to write down much for Verbal questions, but for Quant that can definitely be a drawback. Sure the person can flash their notebook in front of the camera, but that is not the same as being able to see the person’s work as it is in progress. Writing tablets are not expensive, however (you can get one for under $50), so really it makes sense to have one if you are going to be doing Math with an online GMAT tutor. Obviously people tend to be more comfortable writing on paper, but most people I have worked with get used to the tablet very quickly and actually enjoy writing on the screen.

Another con is focus. You would think that if a person is seeking out GMAT tutoring and if they are paying a lot of money for that tutoring they would be really focused during online tutoring sessions. Most people are, but I have definitely tutored some people who just can’t seem to help themselves and who continue to look at their phone and check emails during online meetings. Of course this can and sometimes does happen in live sessions, but the temptation is just much greater in online sessions.

One final con is connectivity issues. I am sometimes amazed at what areas of the world have good internet connections and which do not. I have tutored people in London and Paris who have had really lackluster internet speeds while I have worked with others in less urban areas (like the Greek Islands) who have had great internet connections. Poor connections can certainly hinder online tutoring, but there are usually work-arounds. It has only happened a few times that the internet connection just wasn’t good enough to support online sessions (I had one experience with a girl I was tutoring in New Zealand who thought it would be possible to have a meeting while she was in a tent in the New Zealand “bush” – needless to say that session had to be ended early).

THE PROS

The most obvious pro is convenience. Some people are located in areas where they just don’t have access to high quality GMAT tutoring so the advances in technology that have made online GMAT tutoring so effective have really allowed people from virtually anywhere in the world access great GMAT prep. What is amazing, though, is that some of the people I tutor online are close enough that they could meet with me in person but choose the convenience of online tutoring instead. And many of the people who I begin tutoring in-person at one point or another have an online session with me and then that usually leads to a transition to a mix of in-person and online sessions from there on out. And I can’t even begin to count the number of times that either I or one of my students was a little sick and because of online tutoring we were able to still meet without exposing each other to getting sick.

Another pro is that the functionality of online tutoring sometimes allows for things to happen that could not happen (or at least not as easily) in live sessions. For example, when I tutor people in Verbal, I load the questions onto the screen and we can mark them up together. We can underline things, highlight things, undo comments that we want to get rid of, etc. It is difficult to do that in an in-person session (leaning over a book together is not ideal so in my live sessions I usually look at the questions with my students on an ipad, but we are not able to mark them up). And when I tutor online I am able to provide all of the notes from the sessions as PDFs and I even video record the lessons to allow my students to go back and view them afterwards, something that is not really possible in live sessions (well, it is possible, but it would be very difficult to make that work).

CONCLUSIONS

Whether the pros outweigh the cons is obviously subjective. Some of the experiences that I have online work out brilliantly and often I am convinced that the experience was even better than it would have been if we met in-person. But there have certainly been some cases or some students of mine for whom the online experience did not go quite as well and this is often the result of things like bad connectivity or perhaps attention/focus issues on the part of the person I was working with. For some people online tutoring is the only option, but the trend moving forward is clearly towards more online GMAT tutoring as people who could theoretically meet in-person choose the convenience and other advantages of online tutoring. Really the best thing to do if you are considering enlisting an online GMAT tutor for help is to do one session and see how it goes. In my experience at least,2 most of the people who I work with online are shocked after the initial session at how effective the whole experience can be.