Veritas Prep On Demand Course Debrief 1 – Praveen

by , Oct 3, 2010

The following is a guest post by Praveen, better known as kvcpk on our forums. This is the first of 3 debriefs that Praveen will write for the Beat The GMAT community about his experiences with Veritas Prep's On Demand GMAT Course. Without further ado, here's Praveen.

Hello All,

First, I would like to thank Beat The GMAT and Veritas Prep for giving me the opportunity to take the Veritas Prep On Demand course along with Tutoring hours. This on demand course contains course materials with recorded sessions and is valid for six months. The course can be accessed anytime during the day, giving me the flexibility to study when its most convenient for me. Ive had an hour session with my Veritas Prep private tutor Jeff Robinson so far this week. I have also gone through a part of the on demand course and a couple of course books. Here are my first impressions so far.

How it Began

I enrolled in Veritas Prep On Demand a couple of weeks ago. Id like to thank Marisa from Veritas Prep for making the process so simple and quick. I received my course material a couple of days ago and the first thing Id like to mention is its weight. I was expecting a small pack, but it turned out to be a bundle of materials. The course material included the following in order: Math Essentials, Arguments, Arithmetic, Critical Reasoning 1, Algebra, Sentence Correction 1, Geometry, Reading Comprehension, Data Sufficiency, Critical Reasoning 2, Statistics & Problem Solving, Sentence Correction 2, Combinatorics & Probability, Analytical Writing Assessment, Advanced Word Problems & Quantitative Review. Along with these, I also received a set of 6 yellow graph sheets and a non-permanent marker. A start-up manual is also included to give a brief overview & some strategies for the test.

Going Online

The first thing I did after getting the order confirmation was to access my online account and the Veritas Prep On Demand Course.The Veritas Prep On Demand course has a simple and easy-to-navigate structure. The course lessons guide us on how to use these books. There a total of 15recorded lessons corresponding to each book of the course material. The Introduction video gives insight into the GMAT structure and makes it clear on how to use the preparation materials judiciously for the best results. The course takes us through each topic of the book. Its a mixture of both theory and problems. The lessons include illustrative examples and the students are then required to practice using the practice problems in the book.

Along with the course content, there are lot of resources available online. These include links to the Business Week forum, League of MBA bloggers, and various articles by experts from Pearson, ETS and others. There are also links to Admission FAQs for the top ranked colleges, access to business related readings, and of course some movies too! There is a separate support section that addresses homework problems and queries of students. I think this section will be very useful as they answer queries in less than 24 hours. I should also mention the efforts of the Technical Support staff; they responded spontaneously to address my practice-tests access issue.

First Readings

As mentioned in the start-up manual, I opened the Math Essentials book from the material and logged into the on demand course to view the course video. Math Essentials is a math refresher book and provides an overview of school-level mathematics. I would recommend this to every test taker for 2 reasons. First, it doesnt take much time to go through this. The content is short and crisp. Second, it gives an overview of commonly tested concepts on GMAT, eliminating the possibility for missing basics. For those people who feel that Quant is not their strong suit, I would highly recommend starting with this book.

As instructed by my Tutor Jeff (more about him later), I moved onto the Arguments book next. This is just a 30-40 page book. I was wondering what this would contain. It sets up the platform for each of the sections on the GMAT, giving insights into the type of questions dealt with in each section. It also provides an introduction to GMAT percentile scores.

I will write more on other books in my next post.

Mentor Time

Along with the course content, I also received 10 hours of live online private tutoring. I was expecting a normal tutorial class from some tutor. But I was wrong. Jeff did not start off with the session. He wrote to me asking me every single detail about my preparation until now and my target scores. He made the Agenda clear before the meeting. I thought This is Management. We kicked off our first session and I started with some doubts on Sentence Correction. The way he broke down the sentence into smaller units, getting rid of the unnecessary chunks, amused me. This was something that I didnt bother to do before. He showed me its importance by breaking down a complex 30-word sentence into a 5-word simple statement. I definitely appreciated his knowledge and his patience in answering my silly, stupid questions. He told me something that I really liked: all it takes to beat the GMAT is confidence. We need to find ways to gain it.

So far so good and I took a practice test to assess my skill level. More about it and the rest of the course books in my next post.

Cheers!!!

Praveen