Thanks for the reply, osirus -- and, actually, I'm encouraged by what you wrote.
1) If you didn't have time to memorize the idioms, that may be a blessing in disguise -- the GMAT Sentence Correction questions are NOT dependent on idioms, and actually the authors of the test are lucky that people spend (waste) so much time trying to memorize them, because in doing so they invariably overlook the more important topics (Subject-Verb Agreement, Verb Tense, etc.) that the question writers need to hide in order to make the test more difficult.
Don't let me go off on too long a tangent, but think about the value of idioms for business schools -- say that you had enough time/energy to accurately memorize about 75% of the idioms on one of those Idiom Lists floating around, but you saw by happenstance two idioms that were in the other quarter; does that make you an inherently lesser-qualified candidate than someone who memorized 60% of their idioms, but saw one that they knew cold and guessed correctly on the other? The GMAT needs to be able to, in a grand total of 78 multiple choice questions, several of which are unscored, provide business schools with quality information on candidate's ability levels for business. Idioms are a bit too random to serve that purpose well, and the skill that they test -- "memorization" -- is pretty low on the list of skills (behind problem solving, logic, etc.) that will serve people well in the business world.
So, instead of spending time memorizing idioms, I'd go back to your old practice problems and try to identify more robust grammatical categories that were the difference between right-and-wrong on the SC problems that you missed based on "idiomatic errors". I think you'll find that you can come up with a better explanation for each of them. (Full disclosure -- I did this while working through a huge set of Official Guide SC problems with a student who was obsessed with idioms, mainly because I didn't know the idioms as well as he did and didn't really think I needed to. We went back through the problems, focused on the major elements he was missing, and were able to determine that, with very few exceptions, the questions didn't really require knowledge of idioms. He's now in his last semester at Wharton, and I was able to avoid having to study a bunch of idioms for our next tutoring session!)
2) For Reading Comprehension, we have a system that I've found really helpful in its ability to minimize the amount of re-reading that you need to do and to help you organize your thoughts on the passage so that you're able to find the relevant portions for specific questions pretty quickly. It's tough to teach just in a forum post, but in its most basic form it involves reading at the paragraph level, and asking yourself "why was this paragraph written?" before you move on from each paragraph. That helps you stay focused in smaller doses, and also gives you a blueprint for the passage so that you can go back to specific paragraphs as necessary. There's more to it...but hopefully that gives you a preview. Again, in full disclosure -- I used to hate teaching Reading Comp, because how do you teach someone to be a better reader in a few hours, but over time we've made that lesson one of my favorites to teach.
One other note on the "dreaded, long science passage" -- one of the best things about science passages is that they betray the underlying intentions of the authors of the test: They really don't care whether you know too much about the subject matter when you're done, as long as you can answer the questions. If you read the passages effectively at the "correct level", looking more for author intent and organization than for deep understanding of the topic, you set yourself up well to answer the questions, and a lot of the content itself is irrelevant.
3) I love our Chicago team, so I'm glad you asked about that. I'm always pretty impressed when our students go above and beyond in the "comments" section of their course evaluations to highlight just how happy they were with their instructor. Frankie Beecroft, who is teaching a few of our immediately-upcoming courses in Chicago (including the weekend course this month) probably led the company in such evaluation comments this past round of classes, and Kevin Richardson, who took a little time off from Chicago to teach in warmer locations for us but is now back and teaching some winter/spring classes, historically performs at the top of the list on those, too. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss specific classes, but regardless I'm incredibly confident that you'd be in good hands with either instructor.
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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