EXPERT IN HIS CRAFT

I reached out to Brian for help regarding my GRE with a little more than a month to prepare. In a matter of 4 weeks he helped me increase my overall score by 18 points. He was wonderful with covering strategy, content, and teaching in general. I am a teacher myself, and he specifically geared each lesson and explanation to my individual needs. Not only was I happy with my Verbal and Quant score increase, but his specialty was making me feel confident going into the writing/argument issue topics. We spent only 1-2 lessons on this portion and my score increased immediately. He "dumbs" down what my brain couldn't even begin to sort out. I am now preparing my grad school application materials and will be having Brian help me with my writing for this task as well. Thank you Brian!

Patrick, 10 lessons with Brian

Brian is an experienced, organized, and friendly tutor - I couldn't recommend more highly

I've been working with Brian to study for the GRE for the better part of the year and truly couldn't recommend him more highly. Brian helped me understand how to approach each part of the test systematically in order to have the skillset to tackle any question. He has a depth of experience and knowledge across math, reading, and writing sections of the test. At first, we went over best practices to tackle each type of question and test-taking strategies specifically catered to each section of the test. Once I understood how to approach questions, we spent time covering key content for each section. This was particularly relevant for math where there are rules and formulas that are essential to save time and confidently answer all the questions. I saw my practice test scores improve dramatically using Brian's explanations to understand how to consistently answer the majority of the questions correctly. Towards the end of my preparation, we focused exclusively on more challenging questions because the handful of really difficult questions often makes the difference between a good score and a really great score. This is where Brian was particularly helpful. His depth of experience and teaching skills helped him to clearly explain even the most tricky and creative questions we came across. As a result, I feel I have the tools to tackle any question that comes my way. Brian always struck the right balance between helping me puzzle through the question on my own and providing valuable guidance to accelerate my learning. Our time working together was by far the most productive of my broader studying process. I believe he helped me achieve a level of understanding over the test that I would not have been able to on my own.

Charlotte, 30 lessons with Brian

Brian is great - helped me to plan and learn strategies

I appreciate Brian because he has helped me to not only look for concepts, but apply strategies and save time. Brian has also helped me to recognize when to use certain practices and how to personalize my studying methods (i.e. with vocab & reading comprehension)

Kyra, 10 lessons with Brian

Knowledgeable and very helpful tutor!

Brian was very helpful in reviewing for the verbal section of the GRE. He provided me with tons of tips and practice questions to get me ready for test day! Highly recommend if you need more strategies and tricks for mastering the exam.

Jordyn, 5 lessons with Brian

Knowledgeable, fun, and flexible tutor

Brian taught me the techniques that pushed my score from a 325 to a 332 on the GRE and really helped on the GRE essays. He is very flexible with his timing and approach, skillful in his application of the techniques, and gives pragmatic test taking strategies that help pull up the score. Brian was really flexible with timing and the structure of our sessions. Furthermore, his way of teaching and techniques made the problems alot easier and clearer than they were before. Often when I found myself stuck on a hard question I would try to think about how Brian and I would try to tackle it together in one of our sessions. I would highly recommend him to anyone else for GRE tutoring.

Ritwik, 5 lessons with Brian

Great Tutor!

Brian E. is preparing my daughter for the SAT Test in March. Brian was very knowledgeable and helpful in our first conversation about preparing my daughter for the SAT test in March. I was very impressed with Brian and how he put my daughter at ease and had a plan laid out to prepare her for the exam. My daughter has only had 2 lessons with Brian to date, but in this short period of time she is very happy with the lessons more confident and able to answer questions on algebra that she could not prior to tutoring with Brian! She also looks forward to the lessons which shows how Brian’s tutoring methods have helped her tremendously! I would recommend Brian without hesitation to anyone who wants a professional patient tutor who knows the SAT format and wants to get results in a short period of time!

Angela, 29 lessons with Brian

Disappointed with SAT Essay Lessons

This review is strictly for taking lessons for improving scores on essay portion of SAT. I contacted Brian to setup lessons for my son. We felt my son needed more structured strategy and guidance on improving his score on SAT essay. In our introduction emails, Brian stated that he had a structure program for this. However, after taking two lessons, it seems that he doesn't have one. Brian may be able to edit, analyze and help to revise the already written work, but his approach will take many lessons, costing hundreds and thousands of dollars, to achieve the goal. These are some of our experience and my observation. 1) Brian doesn't really have a lot of experience working with SAT essay portion. He even stated he wouldn't even know what the actual score of the written essay will be by looking at my son's essay. 2) He reviews the essay that my son writes as any writing tutor can do. But we were not looking for writing tutor, but looking to attack SAT essay. His few recommendation on improving SAT essay can be easily found on-line in many places. 3) He didn't provide any structure or organized templates or idea how to tackle SAT essay in a succinct or relatively easy way. As a claimed expert, he should have a strategy to help the kids to improve with ease, but that is NOT the case. 4) His approach is more geared towards improving writing in long term. It may help improve SAT essay, but will take a very long time with many lessons running up the cost in thousands. That model simply is not worthy it and that was not what we signed up for. 5) This may apply how Wyzant works, but he is so sensitive about time. He will calculate every minute he spends even off the system as lesson fee. I am disappointed that extra few minutes here and there must be charged on top of an one hour lesson. 6) I believe SAT essay has its own particular and needs special approach. Our search contines.

Martin, 2 lessons with Brian

Tutor responded:

Hi, Martin, I’m very sorry that you and your son did not have the tutoring experience with me that you were hoping for. Sometimes it does happen that a tutor doesn’t “fit”, and if that ever happens for you or your son again, I hope you know that Wyzant offers a Good Fit Guarantee (https://support.wyzant.com/hc/en-us/articles/208602136-What-s-the-Good-Fit-Guarantee-) that will refund you for the first hour of tutoring with a new tutor. I am a little puzzled about some of the points you made, and I would like to try to clear up any confusions. I do have a structured program for the SAT essay, and I used it with your son. In the first lesson I went over exactly what needs to be done in the essay (showing understanding and analysis of reading, structuring the answer, using English correctly and formally), and gave a clear, step-by-step process for how to do this, summarized in a handout that also features a precise, one-page template for how to structure the essay. We also looked at an example of a good essay to see what made it good, and I reviewed a practice essay by your son and gave him specific feedback on its strengths and weaknesses. I told him what approximate scores it might have received in the real SAT, though I didn’t pretend to be able to say what exact scores the SAT might have given it, because that depends very much on the opinions of the two people who actually score it on the day. In the second session, I reviewed another practice essay by your son, telling him which section was the best written and how he could repeat that in other paragraphs. I helped him to develop more detailed analysis of the text he’d read, and helped him draft an effective paragraph to convey those ideas. At all times, my advice and feedback was focused explicitly on how to score more highly on the three SAT criteria of Reading, Analysis, and Writing. I would have preferred to cover this material in 3 lessons rather than 2, but you wanted me to do it before a particular deadline, so I sped things up. And when I s

Inspiring First Lesson

Today was my first lesson with Brian in achieving better business communication through writing. I found him to be knowledgeable, methodical and a great listener. I look forward to continuing to work with him to improve the content on my website and blogs. Thank you!

Michelle, 7 lessons with Brian

Brian is Superb!!

As the title suggests, Brian is absolutely fantastic. I had just three weeks to study for my GRE and many tutors turned me away for "moral reasons"... apparently it wasn't enough time to study and pass. Brian took me on and we got straight into the action. His overall knowledge and personal experience with the GRE is outstanding and sets him apart to everyone else. He pushed me towards other websites and software that really helped me out in my free time. With this, I was able to send over questions and answers and he appropriately responded. I believed I already had a strong background in the Quantitative sections, but I was definitely unprepared for the GRE. Even after looking through youtube videos and online tutorials, Brian's explanations helped the most. He is clear, concise and extremely thorough with his delivery. Where in some questions I was able to obtain the right answer, I could no replicate the process, it was messy and uncoordinated. The best way to describe Brian is where I could get from A to B, in a long convoluted, mess he showed me a way of getting there in essentially a straight line- the quickest, most efficient way. From here, I was able to replicate my answers and further able to gain consistency in my process, reasoning and results!! Brians base technique is sound. And it's with this technique and his explanations, you absolutely cannot falter or fail. On another note, he's flexible, approachable and British!! Thank you Brian!

Chris, 9 lessons with Brian

Amazing

Love his teaching methods! Helped me get my description grade up by 3 letters and helped me understand narrative and had tons of helpful hints and structures.

Christy, 6 lessons with Brian