‘I Love The GMAT’: This GMAT Doctor Has Diagnosed More Than 4,000 Test Takers

‘I JUST TOOK THE GMAT COLD’

Like so many professionals, he sort of stumbled into the field. An avid mountain climber, he spent half his time in Yosemite National Park while an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Kane worked on the search-and-rescue team, an experience that naturally led him to guide climbers. After earning his BA in 1993, he sat for the GMAT, thinking that business school might be an option. At the time, the exam was still a paper-and-pencil test.

“I just took the GMAT cold,” recalls Kane. “I got high scores all my life in standardized tests. I just like the way you have to think for these tests. I got a 760 the first time taking it, a 99th percentile score.”

Despite his impressive showing on the test, he rejected the idea of an MBA and decided to follow his passion. Kane launched a guiding business at the age of 23, ultimately spending a full decade guiding climbers up and down the rocky cliffs of Acadia National Park in Maine.

AN EXPERIENCED ROCK CLIMBER WHO BECAME A GMAT TUTOR

Kane moved to New York City and concedes he was “a little lost about what to do” so he finally applied and got into business school.

Before starting his MBA, however, he spotted an ad from a firm called Veritas Prep and decided to answer it. Given his GMAT test score, his Stanford undergraduate degree, and his experience as a guide, Kane was quickly interviewed, in part because the father of a Veritas co-founder, Marcus Moberg, was a climber. 

“He saw my resume and said, ‘I got to talk to this guy.’ Marcus and I really hit it off.

Hired to teach some of the larger GMAT classes in New York. Kane was a natural teacher. “I loved it and took right to it,” he remembers. “It was the same job as guiding and rock climbing. It is taking people and getting people through something that is very uncomfortable. I did a lot of one-on-one guiding.”

‘TEST PREP COMPANIES PREY ON THE FACT THAT WE ARE USED TO CONTENT TESTS’

He loved it so much, in fact, that he decided not to go for that MBA. “That was in 2004. I was never one to work in Corporate America. I was lucky to start doing it in New York where I got to work with so many smart people. I learned so much about preparing people the right way.”

Kane left Veritas in 2019 after 15 years of tutoring after the firm was acquired by Varsity Tutors. He built his own curriculum and began teaching online courses and tutoring on his own until joining up with MBA admissions consultant Menlo Coaching in 2020.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, he does not have a favorable view of most test prep companies. “They really prey on the fact that we are used to content tests,” he says. “People think if they beat this test into submission by practicing they will do well. I don’t believe that is true. You have to solve the right problems and get the right takeaways. If you are not getting the proper takeaways to solve each problem, you are not going to improve” (see Kane’s How To Create A Realistic GMAT Study Plan).

THE CONS AND TRAPS IN THE GMAT EXAM

Higher education flows deeply in his veins. His father first moved to Maine to help start a liberal arts college in the state back in the 1970s. His cousin’s husband has a PhD in education from Harvard. “He is just fascinated by this whole part of learning and what is missing from improvement in education. Everyone I teach is a college graduate and these people are scoring in the 90th percentile among highly educated people. It is what has kept me in this game for so long because it is always intellectually engaging. The fact that I get to teach these brilliant people fills me with gratitude.”

What he discovered in tutoring some 5,000 people is that most are more comfortable preparing for a content test with rote memorization. “They think that if they just memorize these things, they will do well. One woman I tutored was one of the most brilliant math minds I ever had in a class. She went through the course, took the test, and didn’t perform that well in the quant. What I quickly realized in tutoring her was that she wasn’t dealing with that con component of the math. There is a lot of critical thinking. She was not focusing on that. She focused on the math. What it proves is that just having the quant doesn’t get you to the elite level and sometimes it doesn’t get you to the gold standard of a 49.”

In another instance, Kane recalls tutoring a student in New York. “He knew everything. A week before the exam, I saw him for the last session and he looked like he had the flu. If he had taken it one more time, he would have gotten a 750 but he got a 690 and it was all test day anxiety. Because he didn’t do well the first time. He ended up going to Booth. I did help him but it was hard and it took a few tries.”

THE GMAT; A QUESTION OF A THOUSAND BRILLIANT CONS

Yet another client who already was enrolled in a PhD program and had exceptional math skills struggled on the GMAT. “It was because the person treated it as a math test when it is a quantitative reasoning test,” explains Kane. “A great challenge is always trying to figure out how can I get the score up for this one person. You are not always going to have success. Some of that can be test day anxiety. We use a few mindfulness coaches and that is helpful.“

In tutoring clients, Kane unravels what he calls the “cons” and “traps” in the test.  “For the quant,” he says, “you need to know what you need to know and very few people come in knowing what they need to know. If you haven’t done math since fifth grade, you need a refresh. It’s not hard math but you need to know it well. I am not doing a lot of rote repetition. I focus on what a person is most likely to make mistakes on. I give them smart drills that elicit the errors they would make on a GMAT question.

“By doing the right problems,” Kane adds, “you are improving your know-how but more importantly you are seeking the tricks and traps. If you want to use an analogy, it’s a question of a thousand brilliant cons. How does a con work? If you think about a great con man, you think about something that happens that you get a dopamine response. You find something clever that leads you to what you think is a correct problem. Because everyone is satisfied that they found the trap, they let down their guard.”

Kane coaches clients not to fall for those GMAT cons. It’s something he greatly enjoys and forsees doing for many more years.

“I am an experienced doctor now, and I will always tutor,” he says. “You’ve got to be in the game.

HOW TO TAKE A GMAT PREP COURSE OR GET KANE AS A TUTOR

DON’T MISS: ADVANCED GMAT PREPARATION FOR TOP PERCENTILE SCORES

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