16. Is Harvard Really Worth It? with Jake Taylor
A lot of people believe that if they can't get in to a top-tier college or graduate school, it's not worth going. Yet, there are a lot of considerations that play into your decision to go back to school, and the prestige of the program is only one factor in choosing the school that's right for you. In this episode of The Dominate Test Prep Podcast we catch up with Harvard Kennedy School of Government alumnus Jake Taylor who recounts his journey from working on Wall Street to teaching middle ...
11 Feb 202043min
15. Overcoming Test Anxiety, with Bara Sapir
Conventional wisdom tells us that if we study hard, high test scores will inevitably follow. But what if we are unmotivated to study or hampered by fear of failure? Or what happens if when we do study, we are plagued by feeling nervous and anxious, and we are not able to perform to our potential? It's no surprise that if you enter the test feeling anything but focused and calm, you risk a subpar performance. But how does one easily get there? We answer those questions -- and more -- i...
28 Jan 202042min
14. How to do Social Media Right for an Admissions Edge, with Taylor Siebert
A recent survey shows that 40% of admissions officers reported to have looked at a candidate's social media while reviewing his/her application, a trend that is expected to continue and even grow in the coming years. What does this mean for you? We invited Taylor Siebert, co-founder of Class Intercom and social media expert, to weigh in on how you can use social media to your advantage as you position yourself holistically during the application process. In this episode we discuss: Why and h...
14 Jan 202048min
13. Reading Comprehension Strategies for ESL Students (and everyone else!)
Struggling with reading comprehension questions on your standardized test? Often that's the case when you're not reading the passages in the most effective way. In this episode we share three strategies for improving your overall reading proficiency, for reading the passages in a way that sets you up for success on a majority of questions, for quickly and accurately determining the author's primary purpose, and for adopting the right mindset when you're dealing with reading comprehension pass...
23 Dec 201936min
12. The Best Way to Improve your Vocabulary
Having a strong English vocabulary is important for doing well on pretty much all standardized tests. It helps with reading comprehension, certainly. But it's also fundamentally important for logically completing sentences like you're asked to do on exams such as the GRE. So what's the best way to learn new words? And should you do anything different if English isn't your native language? We break it all down for you in this episode. Specifically, we discuss: The filter through which y...
17 Dec 201946min
11. 9 Ways to Avoid Making Careless Errors
Sometimes you get questions wrong on your standardized test because you don’t use the proper strategy or simply don’t know the underlying content well enough. But sometimes you get wrong answers because you make careless errors — and those can be avoided in most cases. In this episode we explore nine (9) ways that you can avoid making careless mistakes on test day, thereby increasing the number of questions you get right and boosting your overall score. This is a long show, so here are some t...
3 Dec 201953min
10. Business Education Trends, a GMAT Section Order Fallacy, and CAT Battleship
Several interesting bits of news and insights came out of the recently-held summit at the headquarters of the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), makers of the GMAT and Executive Assessment exams, and we were there to get the scoop. We relate the most relevant takeaways in this episode, including: Trends in graduate management education (GME) with an emphasis on the types of people applying and the programs they're applying to;Why now might be the best time in the past decade to app...
19 Nov 201943min
9. Finding Assumptions Using the "Big 6" Assumption Categories, with Brandon Royal
Brandon Royal, Ace the GMAT author, joins the podcast this week to share his expertise on an important logical reasoning skill that comes into play on numerous standardized tests — identifying assumptions. He has categorized logical fallacies into six common assumption categories, and he breaks them down for you in an easy-to-understand way so that you’re better able to tackle reasoning-related questions on your exam. Specifically, Brandon covers: The prep strategy of working “buckets of prob...
5 Nov 201937min
