Work · Admissions testing
GMAT & GRE
99th percentile on the GMAT, achieved twice. 99th percentile on the GRE, verbal and quantitative. I have sat these papers at the level you are aiming at, which is rarer among tutors than the advertising suggests.
Free practice: 155 GMAT and 104 GRE questions with worked solutions and percentile levels, timed sections at exam pace, and Executive Assessment practice for Executive MBA applicants.
How this is sold
Test preparation sits inside an MBA admissions programme or a graduate admissions engagement. It is not sold by the hour or on its own. A 99th percentile score attached to a badly positioned application still gets rejected, so I would rather fix both.
If a score is genuinely all you need, there are excellent people charging a fifth of my fee and I will name a few of them on a call.
What actually moves a plateaued score
Almost everyone who comes to me has already taken the test once or twice and stalled somewhere in the high 600s or low 700s. The instinct at that point is to do more practice questions. It is almost always the wrong instinct.
A plateau usually comes down to a small number of recurring reasoning errors the candidate cannot see, because the blind spot causing the error also hides it. More volume repeats the error more times.
What works is someone watching you solve problems in real time and identifying the pattern. It usually takes two sessions to find, and once named it is often fixed in a fortnight. The largest single-attempt jumps I have seen came from that, not from a further six hundred questions.
The full method, with GMAC's percentile table and a ten-week plan, is in how to score in the 99th percentile on the GMAT.
The quantitative section, specifically
This is where an Oxford computer science and financial engineering background stops being a decoration and starts being useful.
GMAT and GRE quantitative sections are not tests of advanced mathematics, the content stops around age sixteen. They are tests of whether you can find the efficient route through a problem under time pressure. Someone who has spent a career in quantitative research sees the shortcut immediately and, more importantly, can explain why it is the shortcut rather than just demonstrating it.
The Data Insights section on the GMAT Focus edition rewards this more than anything the old format did.
Verbal, which quantitative candidates underestimate
Engineers, quants and scientists reliably lose more points on verbal than on quant, and reliably spend their preparation time the other way round. Critical reasoning in particular is a formal logic test wearing a linguistic costume, which means it is learnable in a structured way, and the people best placed to learn it quickly are exactly the ones who assume they cannot.
Where this fits
MBA admissions
GMAT or GRE preparation included within a full application programme for M7, London Business School and INSEAD.
By programme MBA admissions consulting → AMFE & graduate admissions
GRE preparation as part of an application to Princeton, Baruch, Carnegie Mellon or an equivalent programme.
By programme Quant careers & MFE admissions →New engagements begin as programmes. See the work.
An hour on where you stand · £250
The assessment
Send your CV, transcript and targets, and I will have read them before we speak. In the hour you get an honest read of where you actually stand, your realistic chances at each target, and the deadlines that apply to you. Credited in full against any programme booked within a month.
Start the assessment — £250 Free 20 minutes first What the hour covers →