Veritas Prep Essentials Course

I don't think we know Chris Kane and David Newland - are you sure they actually participate on the forums? What are their usernames?
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Thanks for asking - they're great instructors and may not be officially registered as experts here but I know they've been on and mentioned the site. We'll fix that if they're not! A little about Chris and David:

Chris Kane

Prior to becoming a GMAT instructor, Chris was an accomplished rock climbing guide, and a member of Yosemite’s Search and Rescue Team, and served as the president of a climbing school in Acadia National Park, Maine. Notable ascents include five routes of El Capitan and a host of first ascents across North America and Canada.

His teaching ability and style has grown from a decade of introducing people to climbing and helping them achieve goals far beyond their expectations.

These days, Chris is a veteran GMAT instructor who has taught over 60 Veritas Prep courses and helped hundreds of students successfully prepare for the GMAT. With his in-depth knowledge of the test and years of teaching experience, he has continuously helped Veritas Prep improve and update their approach to the GMAT as the test evolves.


David Newland

David has been teaching and tutoring as a part of the Veritas Prep team since 2006. He loves to find the most efficient way to do things – especially GMAT problems! This undoubtedly helped him to score above the 99th percentile on both the GMAT and the LSAT. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School with his Juris Doctorate, David worked for the National Park Service living on a wilderness island and writing environmental compliance documents.

Now living in Vermont and working in Boston, David teaches and tutors the GMAT and the LSAT full-time. David is a true GMAT expert, having taught dozens of GMAT courses and written extensively on the subject. His techniques have helped hundreds of students maximize their scores. David was named Veritas Prep Instructor of the Year in 2008.

Can you clarify if the 15 CAT exams that come with the Veritas class are original Veritas Exams or collected from other sources? I read in the CAT master thread that it is really a compilation of 5 800score, 3 PR etc... Thanks

Ya, even I heard the same and was curious to know whether this is correct. I guess Brian would be able to throw some light on this.

Hey guys,

Sorry for the tardy reply here - I was traveling for a long weekend (and actually had a meeting with the aforementioned Chris Kane, our guru instructor in New York, while I was in town) but didn't forget about you!

Our suite of tests includes:

5 Veritas Prep tests
5 GMATLife tests (which we developed)
5 800Score tests
2 GMAC tests

All of the above are full-length CAT exams. We also include 7 Midterm Diagnostic quizzes designed to help students gauge their progress through our syllabus on a more subject-by-subject basis. Those tests will seek to diagnose particular weaknesses (and strengths!) on content-based areas so that students can divert study time to conquering those areas before building up to more full-length CAT tests and advanced homework sets.

I hope that that helps to better explain our offerings...

Cheers,
Brian

Brian
Just be sure the tests that 800scire offers - they don't seem to be CAT, are your's any different?

Other than CATs does the class offer any computer based tests? Are the midterms paper based?
Thanks

Posted from my mobile device

Hey mainhoon,

The 7 midterm Diagnostics are all taken on computer, but aren't adaptive (the design there is to objectively assess your progress through each of our fundamental lessons, so everyone gets the same diagnostic).

The 15 (+2, actually) CAT tests are all designed to be adaptive. As far as I know the 800Score tests that we have should be the same that 800Score offers on its own, as well, but I've taken them and the scoring and feel is in the CAT form.

Cheers,
Brian

Hey everyone,

Just a quick heads up for everyone: We're giving away a free Live Online Essentials Course to anyone who can get 20 friends to become a fan of our page on Facebook! Visit our page to see the details:

https://www.facebook.com/VeritasPrep

Good luck!
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I registered for the Essentials for Dec 4&5 a few days. I just saw on your post that the course is better fit for those who have been studied GMAT for awhile. But I have no prior experience with GMAT whatsoever. Should I keep taking this course?

Hey Ryan,

Good question - and thank you for signing up! I still think it's a good decision (admittedly as the course developer I'm fairly biased). I was advising a coworker who is beginning her GMAT study to take the Essentials Course this weekend as a somewhat-beginning step in her prep, and in doing so I showed her a few examples of why I think it's a good idea. She mentioned that she's rusty on fundamental math skills and might need to simply brush up on those before even attempting a class that uses advanced problems. My advice to her, though, through a demonstration of one of the Essentials Course lessons, is to put some framework around those fundamental skills. While the Essentials Course simply doesn't have enough time to cover all of the relevant skills, we do cover what we call "Guiding Principles" for big-picture math concepts. For example, with exponents I'm a firm believer (and have challenged some of our instructors to prove me wrong) that there are three guiding principles that will solve any GMAT exponent problem. Sure, you need to get comfortable with skills like:

6^y = 2^y * 3^y

x^-1 = 1/x

Etc.

But if you know that your goals with those individual skills are to:

1) Find common bases

2) Multiply terms together - you don't have rules for addition/subtraction so you often need to factor

3) Look for patterns that you can extrapolate to larger numbers

Then you have some direction for what you're looking to do with those skills as you develop (or maybe just remember) them.

In this class we'll focus on big-picture concepts (and their guiding principles) and GMAT-specific strategy. Personally, I'd rather start with that so that I have a vision for what I'm going to do with the content when I get it, but I could see people doing it the other way. The strategic/conceptual stuff is something that I think really anyone needs to be able to do well on this test, and it's the material that I think most people shortcut or just don't know how to study when they study on their own, so that's why I think this class is perfect for those who have already studied some...they're probably pretty comfortable with the skills but I doubt they've put enough though into the concepts and strategies. But even if you're just getting started, I do think there's a lot of value in starting with the concepts/strategies so that you know where you're going with the rest. To me, studying "grammar" and "algebra" seems so brutally out-of-context that I couldn't imagine myself doing it effectively first without having some strategy to think about while I'm doing it, so the Essentials Course in a lot of ways reflects my efforts to create the kind of class I would have wanted to take myself...

I hope that helps, and we look forward to working with you this weekend!

One more addition to this thread - for more information about the design of the course, you may want to check out this interview I did with a blogger in India:


https://mba-gunner.blogspot.com/2010/11/q-with-brian-galvin-part-3-gmat.html

He took the initial round of the Essentials Course and liked it enough to want to learn more about how we created it, and in doing so gave me as much space as I wanted to write so I took him up on it! If you're interested in learning more about the curriculum and design, this link is worth a look.

Hello everyone! Veritas Prep has announced that while the content of the Essentials Course has remain unchanged, there has been a name change to: Veritas Prep Weekend Course. You can find this updated name in our Marketplace and on Veritas Prep's site. If you have any questions about this concentrated GMAT course that meets in one single weekend or on two consecutive Saturdays in-person or online, you can contact Veritas Prep at info@veritasprep.com.
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