Veritas Prep Representative
Joined: 26 Jul 2010
Posts: 416
Given Kudos: 63
Re: Veritas Prep Essentials Course
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30 Nov 2010, 10:38
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!