I will highly recommend Veritasprep GMAT course that I have just completed. Our teacher was Columbia MBA graduate Rob Stringham. He is very knowledgeable, professional and helpful. He would stay with us for 2-3 hours after the end of the class to answer our questions and do the problems together that we asked him about. Not at all like those teachers that behave like they know it all and you’ll never get even close to their level of understanding the topic.

He has a very personal approach to every student. If you are suffering from anxiety passing the exam he will recommend the ways to work with this issue, good literature to read on this topic and some tricks that will help you to reduce the level of anxiety about the test.

Pros:
-Online tools that include the recording of every GMAT topic and the correlating problem solving
-Great teachers, including top MBA schools graduates
- Teachers do not watch the clock. They are very helpful and friendly
-Very friendly and helpful people at the clients’ department. Mark offered me a discount for the course when he saw that I took private tutor lessons with Veritasprep some time ago. He also proposed a bonus time with tutor if somebody of my friends will enroll with Veritas. Very client oriented company!
- Great location, Grand Hyatt

Cons:
-Expensive, but you can repeat the course free of charge in case if you need it.

First, I took the Veritas 1-week immersion course – the course was great, gave me the fundamentals, and then I did about a month of studying on my own. Took the GMAT, scored a 610 (45Q/29V). Studied nothing but verbal and took the test a month later, scored a 610 (47Q/28V). Yes, I was puzzled too. Studied for 2 months with tutoring from Brian Prestia of Veritas, scored 700 (47Q/40V). I think my progression speaks for itself and what Brian’s help did for me, but let me tell you what really worked.

Clearly, I wasn’t approaching the verbal section the right way. First off, Brian really helped me adjust my whole verbal strategy and approach. He helped me analyze my strengths and weaknesses for each type of questions, so that during the test I could spend more time on what I was good at and not get bogged down on questions that cause me trouble and that I waste time on (e.g., inference questions). This really improved my timing and sense of focus on the verbal section. I already had read several books and tips from fellow board members, but there is something about Brian’s coaching that really tweaked my whole verbal strategy.

Secondly, Brian really helped me with understanding the necessary verbal content and rules that would ultimately lead me to the right answer (what really matters). Starting with SC, Brian pointed out the GMAT traps I was simply missing, enabling me to answer the questions more quickly and accurately. On critical reasoning he gave me this visual approach that helped me focus on the missing assumption and that didn’t allow me to dawdle on these questions (which was actually a bigger problem than I realized). Finally, on reading comp, he really helped me identify my strengths (main topic) and weaknesses (inference) and gave me a whole different approach to how I read passages.

All in, Brian’s tutoring really helped. But as most people point out, there is no magic bullet here – you still have to put in the work. My only regret is that I didn’t study more quant with him, as I’m quite certain he would have helped me lift my score there. I highly recommend Brian as a tutor.