The GRE is a widely used exam assessing applicants’ readiness for all kinds of graduate degrees—and an increasingly popular alternative to the GMAT for MBA admissions. Like the GMAT, the GRE presents real challenges, and expert tutoring is an effective way to reach a score that really represents the best of your abilities.
But with thousands of GRE tutors out there, how do you know who will really get results? This article looks at the tutoring offered by some of the top GRE test prep firms on the market today, assessing the pros and cons of each and helping you find the best GRE tutor for you.
Not everyone works with a GRE tutor. What’s the benefit to those who do?
With all the time in the world, maybe everyone would reach their target GRE score through persistent self-study. But the reality of the MBA admissions process (and those for other advanced degrees) is that you’re on a time limit and juggling a variety of other tasks that are similarly crucial to the strength of your application:
The time you spend working to improve your GRE score should be laser-targeted at your weaknesses, using proven test prep methods to boost your score rapidly. Without guidance, or with poor guidance, it’s easy to spend a whole lot of time studying for minimal gain.
You might wonder what tutoring for an exam like the GRE looks like in practice. It of course varies somewhat from tutor to tutor, firm to firm. But the work usually involves
A GRE tutor’s key value lies in their ability to diagnose your weaknesses and efficiently address them, so that time isn’t wasted on endless practice questions that aren’t targeting your specific obstacles.
That is, a deep understand›ing of the test—and of different students’ experiences with it—allows a good GRE tutor to cut straight to the chase, eliminating pointless busywork.
The full value of tutoring, of course, can’t be realized without some independent work on your side. Tutors will give you homework that’s targeted to strengthen your weak areas, and improvement will come not only in face-to-face tutoring sessions, but by steadily working through that homework.
Our GRE tutoring service is facilitated by expert tutors who have not only excellent GRE scores of their own, but a proven track record of successfully boosting students’ scores.
Developed by veteran test-prep experts Chris Kane and Hailey Cusimano, the Menlo Coaching GRE curriculum, uniquely, is solely based on official GRE materials from the test’s creators, the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Where many tutors rely on their firm’s half-baked proprietary prep books, we’ve found you always get the best results with the real thing.
We also work with full-time tutors who not only have 99th-percentile scores, but have made this their career—not people doing some tutoring as a side hustle. Working as a tutor consistently over a long period of time allows you to build up a deep understanding of how students interact with the test, what problems they run into, and the most efficient ways to help them.
The Menlo Coaching approach involves diagnosing your weaknesses with practice tests and then targeting the coaching and homework toward the areas that will allow you to rapidly improve your score.
You can hear more from a past client below:
In contrast to the more structured, comprehensive, “coaching”-style approach favored by Menlo Coaching, Manhattan Prep places a strong emphasis on flexibility. They stress that you can book just a single session if a larger package isn’t what you want, and that there’s no set syllabus; you use the tutoring sessions for whatever you want to prioritize.
The trouble with this freeform approach is that you may not know what to prioritize in order to get the best results. An overly transactional tutoring model—where your tutor explains where you went wrong on specific questions but doesn’t necessarily construct a more comprehensive game plan—risks providing only marginal improvements and ignoring the bigger picture.
(Behind the scenes, too, the firm emphasizes flexibility over commitment, promising its tutors they can “teach as few as 3 hours per week.” That’s great for someone doing tutoring work alongside their day job—but doesn’t inspire confidence in their expertise or level of personal investment in their clients’ progress.)
Manhattan Prep is also a big test prep firm that makes most of its profits not from tutoring but from selling you its own test prep books and other materials.
These and the firm’s online resources are imitation GRE questions, produced in bulk and bearing only an approximate resemblance to the real thing—or even simply edited versions of practice questions for other exams. And they’re what you’ll be working through with your tutor. You can spend a whole lot of time prepping without ever touching a real GRE question, but you might find yourself surprised by the real thing.
The Princeton Review is a key player in the crowded field of big test prep. Offering resources and tutoring for a wide range of exams at all levels of education (right down to elementary school), Princeton takes something of a one-size-fits-all approach.
This is another big test prep firm with an interest in selling you its proprietary practice tests, questions, and prep books. Even more so than other firms, Princeton pumps out an endless range of prep books every year, for all kinds of tests, and working with these inauthentic, mass-produced materials has the same drawbacks here as elsewhere.
The firm talks a big game, branding its tutoring package as “GRE 165+ Tutoring” and ostensibly guaranteeing you’ll reach that score on both parts of the exam, or your money back. That guarantee is somewhat misleading; if your starting score was 159 or lower, you’re guaranteed only a 5-point increase, not 165—so those looking for a larger boost are not covered.
Like Manhattan Prep, Princeton also states that “many of our teachers and tutors work or study full time.” So you can expect this, too, to be a fairly transactional tutoring model, and you should not expect your tutor to spend any time planning your approach behind the scenes, outside of sessions.
Wyzant differs from others in this list in that it’s not a firm with a dedicated team of tutors, but rather a platform for freelance tutors to advertise their services, similar to sites like Fiverr. As such, you can pick from among a huge number of tutors here; at the time of writing, Wyzant lists 1,523 GRE tutors—some at exceptionally low hourly rates.
Of course, seeing those rates and understanding the way the platform operates should give you some pause regarding these tutors’ expertise. Wyzant tutors are often generalists who claim they’re qualified to tutor just about any exam you can think of. This is because there’s little quality control on the platform and nothing to stop tutors casting as broad a net as possible.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the GRE is fairly different from most other standardized tests, in the sense that it’s less focused on content and more on how you approach the questions. Someone who thinks they can effectively teach the GRE simply because they’re great at math and English is likely mistaken.
Wyzant (and similar sites like Varsity Tutors and Leland) are essentially wide open, providing tutors at a variety of price points and with huge variance in quality. At lower hourly rates … you get what you pay for. At higher price points, you’re likely better off considering tutors at more dedicated firms with some real quality control.
Beyond platforms like Wyzant, there are tutors who work completely independently, not on a specific platform or as part of a firm but simply marketing themselves—or, quite often, not marketing at all because they just get clients through referrals.
These are typically tutors who previously worked for bigger firms, built up a good reputation and started to get referrals from previous clients, and realized they no longer needed the support of the firm and could make better money working independently.
Such tutors are often great at what they do, but whether you happen to find one is more down to luck and your network, since they won’t tend to have much online presence.
Prices for GRE tutoring vary enormously depending on where you look. On Wyzant, for example, hourly rates currently range from $10 up to $1,000. At more structured firms, hourly rates tend to be in the range of $150 to $400—though typically with a minimum package of 10 or more hours.
The price of really effective GRE tutoring can be steep—but for many students, the long-term return from getting into their dream school makes it a worthwhile investment.
Hailey Cusimano
Director of Tutoring
Education: BA, MBA
Hailey is a 99th-percentile performer and a self-proclaimed standardized test nerd. Drawing from her years of experience as an instructor, she knows how to assess students’ main obstacles and strategize accordingly, maximizing efficiency in short study windows. Plus, her enthusiasm is infections, and most students find studying with Hailey actually becomes—dare we say—fun.