{"id":50873,"date":"2021-01-31T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-31T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/?p=50873"},"modified":"2025-05-14T12:01:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T19:01:09","slug":"why-these-gmat-experts-approach-test-taking-with-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/why-these-gmat-experts-approach-test-taking-with-empathy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why These GMAT Experts Approach Test-Taking With Empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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How can you ace the GMAT, the EA or any test required at your dream school? [Show summary]<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Mike Diamond of Apex GMAT shares his advice for acing the GMAT, prepping for graduate program tests of all kinds, and why empathy is central to Apex\u2019s approach to test-coaching.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Mike Diamond, Director of Curriculum Development at Apex GMAT talks test prep [Show notes]<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How can you ace the GMAT, the EA, or any tests that may be required at the school you have your heart set on? Today\u2019s guest has your answer.\u00a0Mike Diamond is Director of Curriculum Development at Apex GMAT, and also its Co-Founder.<\/a>\u00a0Mike earned his bachelor\u2019s at Brandeis in 2000 and has worked in finance, strategy advising, and political consulting. However, his passion is the GMAT.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How did you get involved in the test prep business? [1:55]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Entirely by accident. My passion is teaching and helping people, and I\u2019ve always pursued that in all the various places that I\u2019ve been in my career, and even going back to being a student. And like many, I was sort of the go-to guy for friends and family members, as a resource for people I knew, without paying attention to it as a potential career choice. I had spent some time working in a hedge fund, and then I was in the world of political consulting as you had mentioned. I loved it. I was helping people. I was doing really interesting work. But frankly, I was getting a little jaded, and this is well over a decade ago, and I know a lot more people are jaded these days. I was getting a little jaded, and I was having a burrito with my best friend\u2019s cousin. We\u2019re sitting in the Qdoba, and she\u2019s brilliant. She\u2019s actually an instructor at Manhattan Prep and she says to me, \u201cHey, I\u2019m super passionate about Teach For America. I love teaching fourth grade science in North Philly, but I pay my mortgage teaching the GMAT.\u201d I said, \u201cOh really?\u201d At the time, I only thought there were the bigger shops, the Kaplans and Princeton Reviews. And frankly, as an educator, and I certainly consider myself an educator, those never held much appeal for me as a place of employment. I said, \u201cOh wow, that\u2019s really fascinating.\u201d I had always had a proclivity towards psychometric standardized testing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So about four days later, I went in, I did the GMAT, and then I began taking meetings with various GMAT firms. I was disappointed in what I saw, and there\u2019s plenty of great firms and great tutors out there. But once a GMAT business gets beyond a small scale, personalized attention really isn\u2019t a priority, and everything defaults to curriculum and having very bright instructors go through a prescriptive method for learning how to excel. There\u2019s two problems with that. One is that it only gets a candidate so far, and the other is that it\u2019s very one-size-fits-all, and yet one size does not fit all. Very quickly, everything else went into the rear view mirror. I began Apex with some like-minded instructors, and the rest, as they say, is history.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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What is Apex GMAT Prep? [4:54]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Apex is dedicated<\/a>\u00a0to helping people become better thinkers and better learners. We really consider the GMAT and the results that you get from becoming a better thinker as a result of that deeper process, permit you to be a more creative problem-solver, a more critical thinker in your profession, in your MBA, EMBA, or other graduate school program, and in your life and your relationships. There are a core suite of thinking skills that are not taught academically, that come through experience, but also come through having a particularly great teacher or particularly great circumstances with respect to family or mentors on how to approach the attitudinal adjustments one needs to make the emotional and psychological adjustments that one has to make to even approach intractable problems. Most of this is what we focus on. It\u2019s not tips, it\u2019s not tricks, it\u2019s not heuristics. It\u2019s how you enhance your level of skill and become a better thinker all around, and the GMAT scores kind of comes along for the ride.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How do you do that? What is the method of delivery? [6:25]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Everything is online, but even prior to COVID, I\u2019d say 90 to 95% of our clients worked with us online. We\u2019ve traveled the entire world, but we have in place a great online learning system, not just a classroom, but an online platform with 6,000 questions and practice exams and all that stuff that you ought to expect with whomever you\u2019re working with. We do customized one-on-one tutoring, helping each individual learner understand their mind and how it works. Different people operate differently, approach things differently. A core precept for us is that we don\u2019t teach down. It\u2019s not about, \u201cDo it this way because that works for me,\u201d or, \u201cIf you see this problem, then do it this way.\u201d It\u2019s about iterating with the client towards those solution paths that work best for them, their proclivities, their wiring, if you will.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What does Apex bring to the test prep marketplace that it previously lacked? [7:49]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Cognitive empathy. It\u2019s a term we use here at Apex, and it\u2019s the core filter for an instructor to come join us. All of our instructors have scored at least a 770, but even so, 90% of them don\u2019t make the final cut because of this thing we call cognitive empathy: the ability to get inside others\u2019 heads, understand how they think, how they\u2019re approaching problems, what their preferred learning style is, their method of construal. Or, are they spatial thinkers, are they graphic thinkers? Are they narrative thinkers? The ability to both help others access their own thought process and mentor them to be mindful with their thought process, so they can go in and adjust it and use it to the best effect and sense the things that clients aren\u2019t seeing. This really is the vital part of the process. It\u2019s why you go to a tutor. It\u2019s not for someone to run you through a bunch of problems. It\u2019s for them to see the things that you can\u2019t see, especially if you\u2019re already performing well and you\u2019re so focused on the task at hand that you can\u2019t switch and have enough bandwidth to observe what it is you\u2019re doing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n