Should you take the GRE over the GMAT for your MBA? This Expert Says Yes

Mario was trained as a physicist, mathematician, and engineer in Colombia. When he realized his passion for teaching, he started working as a full-time standardized test tutor. With 12 years of experience under his belt, he now helps MBA applicants crack the GMAT and GRE as our in-house tutor.  

We sat down with him to dive into the most practical GMAT and GRE preparation strategies, how to choose between them, the biggest mistakes students make, and how applicants can manage to study effectively while juggling their full-time jobs.

Watch the full interview below.

How did you become a GMAT tutor? 

Mario: I like to think of myself as an insatiable learner. And you know how the saying goes: if you want to learn, teach. That's how I ended up becoming a GMAT tutor!

I actually started by luck. I'm a physicist, mathematician and engineer by training.

A friend of mine used to work for a large test prep company and he was quitting and needed to find a replacement. I took an interview just to get him off my back and found that I really liked the job! 

How does your background translate to your GMAT tutoring?

Mario: I once watched the movie Limitless. I thought: I need to be like that guy, but without the pills!

That means I wanted to find ways to make my learning as effective and lasting as I could. I started reading a lot about it and trying new things, both with myself and with my students. 

I don’t think I do something extremely new or unconventional. It’s a mix of things we probably already try at some point in our lives, but we don't realize how effective they are. There’s no magic formula. It’s just understanding; for example, if you want to learn and remember something, it’s better to study small bits every day rather than cramming all at once. It’s about being structured. 

And I also like to be funny!  That’s something people don't realize. If you’re funny, that makes it memorable; if you make it memorable, people connect the dots better. 

There’s a book, Moonwalking with Einstein, which talks about memory. It’s about a regular guy, a journalist, who becomes a memory champion. And he says he couldn’t even remember where his kids were before training for this! And the way he did it was by making connections. Think about how you would connect Michael Jackson and Albert Einstein, for instance. Those kinds of connections help you remember more. So I do like to be a bit of a comedian and a teacher at the same time. 

How should applicants choose between the GMAT and the GRE?

Mario: Right now, as of July 2025, I’d say my recommendation is to take the GRE. 

The GMAT Focus came out roughly 2 years ago. The GRE has been run (and it is roughly the same test) for more than 10 years.

The tests are unbalanced because of the constant changes over time. But both tutors and test prep companies have a pretty good idea of what's on the GRE, so it’s way more predictable than the relatively new GMAT Focus. So when people are preparing for the GMAT Focus right now, they find that sometimes they do great on the Quant and then they focus on pumping up the Data Insights and Verbal numbers. But in the actual test, their Quant score may be lower than what they got on the practice test. That’s because it’s still a bit tough for us to predict what's on the test.

So we might be over-emphasizing some areas and not realizing that there are other questions that we should be training our students on.

So it’s not that the GRE is an easier test. It’s just that it has had a consistent history and therefore tutors understand it better. 

But what people should do, in general, is to take a practice test for both. You can find free practice tests online, so you should take one official practice test for the GMAT and the GRE from one of the more reliable test prep companies.  

You’ll see what you're up against, and that way you'll be better equipped to understand what your chances of improving on one or the other are. 

Schools don’t prefer one over the other. They’re on different scoring systems and they have different styles. For instance, the GMAT is now the GMAT Focus, which is more data analysis oriented. The math part is a little more technical. The GRE is more straightforward, but the language part is somewhat tougher there. 

So you need to see for yourself to decide which format you like better. 

What’s the biggest mistake people make when preparing for the GMAT/GRE/EA? 

Mario: I have a small riddle to answer this question. 

How often do you use Google search?  

Sam: Perhaps three times a day. 

Mario: Think about it. You see the logo every day. Do you know what the colors on each one of the letters are?

Sam: I could tell you what the colors are in general. But I could never tell what each letter’s color is. 

Mario: So the biggest mistake people make, in my experience, is something we call the illusion of learning. You may think that because you see something or because someone else is showing you something, you’ve understood and learned it.

But that’s what we call passive learning. It’s like going to the gym to watch other people work out. 

When you're studying, it's not enough to say: I get the explanation. After you feel like you've learned it, you should try it yourself and see if you can really remember. We see the Google logo everyday but we never think about it consciously. 

To learn, you need to get your hands dirty. In test mode, that means doing practice tests, iterating on questions, and trying similar exercises over and over to apply the strategies you’ve learned. 

In the 80s, there was a study by a psychologist called Benjamin Bloom. It is now known as Bloom’s 2 Sigma. Bloom claimed that if you compare a regular classroom environment to one-on-one tutoring using a mastery learning technique, you could improve the results of the average student by two standard deviations. 

The idea of mastery learning is that you're going to learn a new concept. If you get it wrong, we review what went wrong. We’ll fix it and try another one. If you get that wrong again, we review what mistake you made yet again. Once you get it right, we try a tougher question. And you continue to do questions until you've reached a level of mastery that is equivalent to roughly 90%.

When you get to this 90% level, we can move onto the next concept. And Bloom proved that it really worked. That’s the whole point of working with a tutor. If you have someone who can give you immediate feedback, help you craft the right curriculum for you, and help you practice until you feel like you’re getting it, it’s going to make a real difference to your score. 

What strategies should people struggling with the GMAT quant use? 

Mario: For Quant specifically, you have to make sure you get the foundation strong before you move on to tougher topics. That means – for instance – that you need to make sure you know your algebra and arithmetic inside out because you’ll use that for everything else.

And there is a right order; you can’t do geometry first if you’re not good at ratios, because you use ratios the whole time when you’re doing geometry. 

And like I said before, we need to continuously go back and review the mistakes we've seen in the past. That's what really makes a difference.

The method is called spaced repetition, which science backs as the best way to learn. That's one of the first things I teach my students how to do. You review material at increasing intervals to improve your memory skills. So if people want to get really good at math, they need to  choose the right order and constantly review what they've seen.

But that doesn't mean studying 100 pages of your prep book every day. There are computer systems to help you study smart and choose exactly what order you should be prepping in.

Sam

Jon

Zack

Alex

Malvika

Rowan

Nanako

Mario

How should an applicant juggle GMAT test prep with their full-time job?

Mario: Definitely get a tutor. They can help you work much faster than you can do it on your own!

Many applicants use GMAT prep platforms to study on their own. But these platforms can be massive and it might get hard to do the full curriculum. It can also feel discouraging when you see how many units are in there and you can only accomplish a little every day. 

A tutor takes care of the curriculum organization for you. It’s like having a gym instructor in a sense – they’ll help keep you accountable. 

What really helps is regularity. You don’t need to do 3-5 hours a day. That’s a question I get a lot when students first come to me: how many hours should I be studying?

It depends on what stage of preparation you're at. At first it should be probably an hour a day. Later in your preparation: an hour and half, maybe 2 hours towards the end. You don’t need to do this full-time, just find small windows of time where you feel like you can really focus and disconnect from everything else. 

Something that helps people is using the Pomodoro technique, which is basically setting a timer for 25 minutes, choosing a single task to work on, and forgetting about everything else.

One of the reasons we feel like time is not enough to do all the things we want to do is because we're trying to do 10 things at once. If you're just doing an hour a day, broken into two 25-minute slots where you’re really focused, and two 5-minute breaks, you’ll find yourself surprised at how much you can accomplish.

What are some good time management strategies for GMAT?

Sam: Let’s talk about timing during the test. It's a classic mistake and it's also something that I struggled with personally when I took the GMAT back in the day. How do you train people to stay on time and not get behind in the tests?

Mario: When people train for the test with me, we see something called the guiding principles.

The guiding principles are those big ideas that you want to apply to some exercises. The process in itself isn’t what takes too much time, but it’s not knowing what to do the moment you see the question. It’s second-guessing your approach. Maybe you start one way and change your mind, then backtrack and try a different approach. That's what really eats up your time.

What I teach people is to have a guiding principle when it comes to the types of questions asked. If you see a question for which you don't really know what to do, think of some emergency strategies that we’ve also talked about. And if that doesn’t work, abandon the question. Jump ship because you don’t know what’s ahead, and you don’t know how much time you’re going to need. You don’t want to spend 5 minutes on a question and get nowhere. In that case, just take the hit and continue. 

Something that people really like about the GRE, is that you can go back and answer previous questions. There’s never this FOMO of missing a question and wondering if the next ones are tougher. You can always go back and change everything and they don't penalize you for that.

So from a psychological perspective, it makes it less mentally strenuous and stressful, which helps a lot of people's performance, I expect.

How should a non-native English speaker tackle the verbal section of the GMAT?

Mario: For non-native English speakers, I like to think of the Pareto rule, which indicates that people spend 80% of their time working on the thing that just gives them 20% of the results.

So what you have to understand is that you might not be a language expert or a writer, but you definitely have some foundations. If you’re able to take the test, that means that you already have the right foundations to do so. Keep it simple. For instance, when it comes to the reading comprehension section, especially when we're talking about shorter questions, paraphrasing works like a charm.

You have to learn to see the context and pay attention to other cues. Like vocab questions, which are really about reading comprehension. It’s basically the same thing we do when we're reading a book on our own and we might come across a word we don't know. We use the context to figure out its meaning, in most cases. The same goes for sentence correction for people who are taking the Executive Assessment.

So don't torture yourselves thinking that you need to know everything to do well. There are some key principles you can apply. Start small and practice well.  

Also, schools may be a bit more forgiving when it comes to your verbal scores where you're a non-native speaker. You have no excuse on the quant side, but as long as you have a good TOEFL or IELTS score, schools are likely to look the other way if you don’t get a perfect verbal score. 

For those who are native speakers, I’d say that while they need to work on the reading comprehension section as well, there are certain traps that they can get stuck in. If you have a really good grasp of the language, you need to pay attention to details. For instance, the difference between a percentage and a number, or the difference between a correlation and causality. Once you start seeing these things pop up in different contexts, it will become easy to see through the trickery.

The other thing is extreme language. Words like “never”, “always”, “must”, “can’t” – all of those are red flags. Pay attention to those details. 

Sam: The problem with native speakers is overconfidence! Many may think “oh, I know how to read things”. So you let your guard down and that’s how they get you. They got me! There are idioms and colloquial expressions in England that are grammatically incorrect, but I use them all the time. Boom: they caught it. I was very gullible for that while taking the test, so I can completely see why that's important.

Is the GMAT/GRE exam harder than practice tests?

Mario: Yes and no.

The thing is, there are many practice tests out there, so it depends on which ones you're trying.

In terms of difficulty, I can tell you that I know some that are below the test bar and there are some that are way above it. And people get a lot of anxiety when they see the tougher ones because they think: if these are the practice tests, what’s going to happen when I take the actual test? 

I have a compendium of paper practice tests that I share with people for them to work on when they get the chance. And I tell them that there’s a particular one I don’t want them to do first, because it’s feels most like the actual test. I ask them to build some muscle before they face it.  But many do end up taking it first, and they feel like it was quite easy even. But when they grade themselves, they can’t believe how badly they did. 

And that’s the thing: the tests are not difficult because they’re conceptually challenging. They’re tough because they’re laden with many traps and watch-outs that you fall for if you haven’t prepared for them. 

Something I tell people is, if you're able to do a question in less than 30 seconds, and you just can’t see how someone could get it wrong, then you may be falling for a trap. It feels harmless, but the tests are just tricky. They know how people think and they're deliberately trying to catch people both on the quant and the verbal side.

Sam: And that's why you have a job, because you can predict how they try to trick people.

Mario: Yes, I love it. That's exactly what we do!

Sam: If you think Mario's work style appeals to you and you’d like to get in touch with him, book a free intro call. I would strongly encourage getting in touch with Mario early in the process to give yourself the very best shots at the GMAT, GRE, or the EA. 

---

We did a detailed comparison on the merits (and demerits) of the GMAT and GRE so you can decide which test is better for you. Check it out.