Hey khorsani,
Sorry to take the whole weekend to get back to you - I was up in Portland from Friday to yesterday running the "Hood to Coast" relay race (200 miles from the highest point in Oregon to the ocean...I highly recommend this race for anyone who can make it!).
To your questions about Veritas:
1) Our hiring process consists of three steps. First, we conduct a telephone interview with selected candidates whose resumes impress us and fit our needs. Second, we invite those that excel in the first interview to join us for an online, teaching-based interview in which they teach a few problems to us in our online classroom. I personally conduct the first and second round interviews, and look for the following attributes in those that I advance to the next rounds:
-The basics - 99th percentile score, teaching experience, etc.
-A real intellectual curiosity about the GMAT and about helping students conquer it. It's one thing to know how to do the questions correctly; it's a much higher level to have thought about it from the testmaker's perspective. Those applicants we do hire tend to say things like "I bet students struggle with certain DS questions because __________" and "I'd predict that as the test gets harder it will do so by including more of the _____________ type of verbal questions." We want out instructors to enjoy thinking about the GMAT as much as they succeed at taking it.
-A genuine enthusiasm for helping people think and for teaching. I want instructors to have a favorite GMAT problem type, and I want to feel their enthusiasm for it through the phone. I want instructors to convey passion when they talk about their teaching success stories and about what got them interested in teaching the GMAT.
-The ability to contextualize GMAT problems when they teach them. Anyone can tell you that the answer, for example, is D. But our instructors should tell you what that problem means for how you should study. The two most important facets of the teaching-based interview are "what takeaways should students have after discussing this problem" and "what are the trap answers here and why would students pick them". We want instructors who don't teach content - they teach students, takeaways, and strategies.
Our third interview round is conducted in person with one of our regional "Mentor Instructors". David mentioned that he's a member of this team, which includes about a dozen instructors. Candidates write and teach their own GMAT questions to the Mentor interviewer, who upon a successful interviewer becomes a mentor for the new instructor, sharing resources and insight and serving as a local point of contact for a new instructor to supplement the training that instructors get from headquarters.
Once instructors are hired, they serve as teaching assistants on our Live Online course so that they get a feel for how students respond to our lessons. In this way, they get to watch a veteran instructor lead a class and can therefore make notes on pacing lessons, building analogies, catering to different ability levels, etc. But they also get to practice responding to student questions, anticipate the types of mistakes that students will make, etc. This process also gives them something tangible to complete when undertaking the other training activities of prepping lessons, viewing recordings, etc., as they know that there are official dates by which they need to be ready to answer student questions, and they have reflective periods after each class to make sure their preparation was at the right level to help serve students.
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As far as the practice tests, yes, we do offer a suite of practice tests that includes some tests that are licensed from other providers, including 800Score. We do this so that we can offer more practice tests to our students, and so that students have access to multiple pools of test questions and scoring algorithms (sort of like having diversity in the gene pool - if there are any slight biases in the way that one set of tests is scored or created, having multiple pools will help to dilute that).
I hope that helps answer your questions - thanks again for asking and for being so thorough in your research!
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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