You can't build a good product without feeling the pain of the customer. LTG Exam Prep Platform and our first product, the Prep4GMAT mobile app, were born out of my own pain as a hopeful MBA student who'd failed nearly every GMAT I took. Over the course of a year and a half, I struggled to get the score I knew I needed in order to get into a top MBA program. Compounding the disappointment I felt each time I saw my final score was the fact that I couldn't pinpoint why I kept getting the same result.
As a former professional basketball player in my native country of Israel, I had to balance my training and game schedule with first school and then later my required military service: Hard work and preforming under pressure were nothing new to me. I was able to become a good professional basketball player largely because I was willing to work harder than everyone else. And as an athlete, I developed a mindset of never giving up on achieving goals and practicing relentlessly until succeeding. However, when it came to the GMAT, my hard work at the beginning seemed to count for nothing.
Admittedly, the first time I took the GMAT, I tried to wing it without studying much. When my poor results showed me that this wouldn't work, I began preparing seriously for the test. I studied with well-known course books and online courses and committed myself to getting a high score. Despite this, my score improved little the second time I took the exam, and again, after my third and fourth GMAT, I walked away disappointed.
Something wasn't right. By the fourth time I took the test, I knew the material well, and I had been scoring high on all the practice tests, yet none of this seemed to matter when I took the actual test. It was obvious to me that there was a divide between how GMAT books prepared you for the test and what the test was actually like. Still, with the mindset of an athlete, I knew I had to find another path to success. Failure was not an option.
After the fourth time I took the GMAT, I did something drastic. I quit my job at General Electric, where I had been working as a software engineer developing medical devices, and gave myself until January of the next year to really focus on acing the GMAT and getting into business school. To overcome the stress on the actual test day, I incorporated relaxation techniques and mental simulations of the test into my daily routine, and I learned how to surf, starting most my days in the sea.
By the fifth time I took the GMAT, I was in the thick of applying to schools, and fortunately, I finally got the high score I had been aiming for. After a few interviews, one rejection letter, two waitlist spots, and one offer from another school, I received the call I had been wishing for from MIT Sloan School of Management notifying me that I had been accepted into their program. I was overjoyed, but I didn't forget my experience with the GMAT.
As soon as I had finished applying to MBA programs, I had already began to lay the groundwork for LTG. I consulted with the top GMAT tutors to write new practice questions that better represented the material on the exam, and using my computer science background, I developed algorithms for helping students recognize the concepts being tested in each GMAT question. The Label Study Method highlights keywords in questions in a visual way in order to clue you in to the concepts behind the questions, making it easier to break problems apart and recall the necessary information in order to select the correct answer. This system can also track the pattern of your mistakes, alerting you to the specific concepts that require more attention.
The new, realistic GMAT practice material and the Label Study Method are at the core of the Prep4GMAT app, a mobile app that allows you to study whenever and wherever you want. With 90 percent of test takers working fulltime jobs, they often can't fit traditional lecture courses into their schedules — nor does this style of learning provide them the individual instruction necessary to really improve their scores. Our app and our exam prep platform aims to address these issues. As education moves toward a more mobile, personalized experience that can be adapted to each student's needs, so should standardized exam preparation. LTG isn't only here to help you improve your GMAT score; we're also here to change exam prep as a whole by making it more accessible and tailored to your lifestyle and needs. We look forward to continuing to make this a reality.