Why Does Ron Get So Little Love?

FULL DISCLOSURE:

I'm writing this article because I'm appalled to see the little reviews that Ron has on this tutor section. He runs an entire segment 'Thursdays with Ron' on Manhattan's website which is completely free. I don't know if the company pays him to do this, but it appears that he has either volunteered or he was hand selected to run the recurring series every week. Regardless, I can tell that he puts a lot of heart and effort into this free public segment so as a big THANK YOU, I am writing this review hoping that he gets a chance to view my appreciation.

Let me just start off by saying that I'm an older candidate (late twenties/early thirties) and when I first started GMAT Prep, I did not remember that a triangle is 180 degrees nor did I remember the definition of a Prime Number. I spent a lot of time reading through the Manhattan GMAT book series, consuming over a month's work as I wasted time learning idioms and technical terms of the English language. Although I must be fair and disclose that English is my first language, I was never a great writer nor was I ever a good standardized test taker. B/A student throughout most of high school and a C student in college.

After spending 1+ month reading through the Manhattan GMAT series, I scored a 560 on the MGMAT diagnostic exam. I then went through all of OG 2015 problems, watched some Veritas & GMAT Pill videos to score a miserable 560 on my first GMAT exam. I then began to realize I was memorizing certain math formulas, idioms, verbal techniques/shortcuts, things to look for throughout SC/CR/RC instead of UNDERSTANDING the actual material. The biggest change in my score happened when I stopped learning shortcuts/patterns that a lot of other prep companies teach, but instead followed Ron's method by doing a full dive into the material, fully grasping the concepts -- what I would call "rolling in the mud."

Well to make a long story even longer, Ron helped me truly understand CR/RC/SC, fundamentals of quant, and how number properties truly work. I think I started GMAT Prep with a high 20 Verbal score and on test day, I ended up scoring a 96% percentile on CR, but RC dragged down my overall score as I'm notorious for making careless mistakes in that arena.

I will fill out a more detailed debrief later on when I retake the GMAT a third time for a more (hopefully) accurate score as I was hitting around 730-760 on the GMAT Prep software. I only had 2 hours of sleep this time around, but still managed to score a 680, which was well over a 200+ improvement from when I first began my studies. Ron, you are THE MAN. Thank you once again for everything you do.