It’s good to know about the typical corporately-trained GRE prep instructor of the expensive, packaged online, or live classroom, courses. They are trained for one of the myriad GRE, MCAT, GMAT, or SAT tests a large company offers everywhere. This instructor is usually someone with some form of classroom experience – a company criterion. Perhaps he/she was an English teacher, or even a special education instructor who never had seen a GRE test curriculum before. This person is run through a series of trainings, often online, from company documents and videos, in specific test strategies, specific questions and their answers, and specific examples organized in a specific way. Often the trainee is trained well enough to get a high score on the GRE or perhaps got one some time ago, but sometimes even this is not a criterion for being hired. The training makes sure the teacher’s explanations are “by the corporate book” and must be more or less delivered the way the company approaches the test. Does all this training make that person a skilled online or in-person test prep teacher? The answer is no. Mark hears often from his current students about the corporately-appointed teacher of a course they had paid big bucks for that was a disappointment – too boring, linear, unimaginative to keep student interest. And too limited to crack through and troubleshoot mistakes in an insightful, growthful way. Read more