Contact Me About GRE Test Prep

I’m thrilled to meet with you for a free consultation to communicate my passion for what I do, and get a sense for what would most benefit you.

There’s no expectation to sign up at the end of the consultation – you can use it to see if we’d be a good fit.

E-mail me, Brandon, at seattleGREcoaching@gmail.com, and include the following information:

Your name, and when you’re planning to take the GRE
Your previous experience with the test (if any), including previous scores
The scores (in Verbal and Quantitative) that would make you happy
How you feel about taking all this on – this expert study for the GRE?  Eager?  Apprehensive?  Disgusted?  (It’s good for me to know this ahead of time, so I can serve you better)

Don’t have access to your email right now?

You can also use this web-form to answer these questions and send me an email.

Prices

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ONE-ON-ONE COACHING

Lessons are $120 for a 2-hour session, plus a $100 initial fee for books.  I’m committed to custom-fitting my instruction to work around your schedule – how long you have until the test & how often you’re able to meet.

(If you need to cancel a lesson, please do so at least 24 hours in advance.  Cancellations made later than that pay a $45 fee; no-shows are asked to pay the price of the lesson.)

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Where do you meet?

We’ll meet at the Roy Street Coffee and Tea house, in Capitol Hill, Seattle: a pleasant environment with free parking.

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How does this compare to other local GRE tutors?

Because I’m independent, I’m able to charge significantly less than my national competitors.

Interested?  Have questions?  Contact me for a free consultation, where I can lay out the course in person.

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SMALL-GROUP COACHING

The 12-lesson course costs $800.  Lessons are 2 hours long, and are in the meeting room of Roy Street Coffee and Tea house, in Capitol Hill, Seattle: a pleasant environment with free parking.  Groups are limited to 4 students.

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Are discounts available?

If you enter the group with a study-buddy (an acquaintance who you meet with once a week to review), I’ll give you a $75 discount.

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How does this compare to other local GRE classes?

Because I’m independent, I’m able to charge significantly less than my national competitors.

Interested?  Have questions?  Contact me for a free consultation, where I can lay out the course in person.

Is this for me?

Would this course be a good fit for me?

I passionately train students to maximize their intellectual agility.  But this isn’t for everyone – expert study requires desire and hard work. To be a great fit for this course:

You should want to substantially raise your score.

You should enjoy learning fascinating things.

You should be able to engage in at least one hour of focused practice each day.  (Two is better.)

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Sounds pretty hardcore.

It is: but I’m committed to efficiency as well.  At every moment, you’ll attack only that which is most essential for sharpening your cognitive power.

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However, you don’t have to be a “good student”, though it’s fine if you are:

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You don’t need to have scored well on standardized tests before.

You don’t need to think of yourself as ‘smart’.

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As long as you want to improve, and can block aside the time and energy to do expert practice, I can help you.  If you’d like to get your feet wet, contact me for a free, one-hour consultation.

Develop Verbal Skills for the GRE

Even a reading-intensive undergraduate experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll do well on the GRE Verbal. To improve your score, you’ll need to systematically build vocabulary, sentence syntax skills, and logical reasoning.

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How does the course build vocabulary?

As always, using the fruit of cognitive science. You’ll learn how to fold words into long-term memory, how to make them easily accessible once they’re there, and how to deconstruct words you’ve never before seen – all as efficiently as humanly possible.

After this, you’ll laugh at the way most people cram GRE vocab.

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Can you really improve reading ability?

Yes.  Reading is a complex skill, but like any other skill it can be built by expert practice.

I love – love – teaching reading. And I love showing you how to quickly and confidently read the GRE’s convoluted texts.

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How does that work?

The secret: breaking things down. People routinely stumble through the wordiness of academic writing.  But I can train you to simplify those sentences into subject-verb pairs an 8^th grader could read.

Try reading the following sentence aloud – extra points if you do it in a single breath:

“Yet one more meticulous case in point for such well-established propositions as that ancestor worship supports the jural authority of elders, that initiation rites are means for the establishment of sexual identity and adult status, that ritual groupings reflect political oppositions, or that myths provide characters for social institutions and rationalizations of social privilege, may well finally convince a great many people, both inside the profession and out, that anthropologists are, like theologians, firmly dedicated to proving the indubitable.”

After a few days of practice, you’ll be able to – without stress – simplify and understand it:

“Yet one more meticulous example for such well-established propositions as that ancestor worship supports the jural authority of elders, that initiation rites are means for the establishment of sexual identity and adult status, that ritual groupings reflect political oppositions, or that myths provide characters for social institutions and rationalizations of social privilege, may well finally convince a great many people, both inside the profession and out, that anthropologists are, like theologians, firmly dedicated to proving the undoubtable.“

All GRE passages can be broken down like this.  Impossible text becomes possible, and difficult text becomes easy.

And I’ll train you in more tools of close, analytical reading – you’ll learn to trace back pronoun antecedents, find major ideas with conjunctive adverbs, and boil down whole passages to a few sentences.

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What about the Sentence Completions, Analogies, and Antonyms?

In addition to amassing vocabulary, you’ll master the heuristics (problem-solving formulas) for each test section.  Again, we’ll use the findings of cognitive science: you won’t just hear about these methods, you’ll learn them thoroughly, and will be able to expertly employ them at a moment’s notice.

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Might any of this be useful for graduate school?

Yes!  The GRE Verbal predicts reading performance in grad school, so the systematic development of advanced literacy will help you with the terrible prose you’ll have to read as an MA or PhD candidate.  Much of what you’ll learn here comes from a course I taught at UW (in the Comparative History of Ideas Department), of which one Honors student wrote, “I wish I had taken this course as a freshman – it would have changed the entire course of my undergraduate education.”

Interested?  Have questions?  Contact me for a free consultation, where I can demonstrate and explain these skills in person.