Our New Essential Skills Assessment Prep Option

We do offer 1-1 Essential Skills Assessment tutoring, but we recognize tutoring can be cost prohibitive. While the Essential Skills Assessment is marketed as a "no prep" exam by GMAC and many of the schools that accept it, most of these MBA programs do require a score of 8. And the assessment is not that easy. It does require you to draw on academic math and verbal skills that you may not have used in quite some time.  We are not aware of any way to prepare for this specific exam beyond 12 practice problems provided by GMAC in a PDF (that itself can be difficult to find online).

Our course for $44.99 should give most students an extremely large advantage over those who do no prep at all. Use code FIRSTMONTH for the next 30 days to receive a 66% discount (pay $14.99 instead of $44.99).

Sign Up for Our Self-Paced ESA Prep Option

What Is In Our Essential Skills Assessment (ESA) Course?

Our new ESA course is self-paced. It takes about 2-3 hours to watch all course videos and complete a few simple assignments. A few additional hours of practice outside of the course is also recommended.

The course is structured to provide critical insight into the unique ProctorU facilitated online-only official exam interface, where physical note taking is forbidden. We cover each of the three question formats used by the exam and discuss how to engage with each of Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Quantitative Word Problems using only a text box for notes and manual calculation when neither pen, paper, nor calculator are provided. We review the core math skills required to do well: basic computation, ratios & proportions, basic algebra, applied problem solving.

We take time to explain the scoring, applications, and registration processes in detail, so that potential ESA test takers are no longer left searching the Internet blindly for support documentation that is not necessarily well distributed.

Finally, we provide ideas and direction on how to prepare using all available free material from GMAC on the ESA (including going over how to do many of the sample problems they provide), select GMAT questions that are similar to what may appear on the ESA, and 3rd party web-sites that help you brush up on key math skills.

The 1-2 hours you invest in this course will help you learn how to engage and excel on the Essential Skills Assessment.  The course is days away from being launched officially.

 

Sign Up for Our Self-Paced ESA Prep Option

About the Essential Skills Assessment

The exam is made up of two sections: Verbal Reasoning (i.e., reading comprehension and critical reasoning) and Quantitative Reasoning (i.e., basic computation, ratios & proportions, basic algebra, and applied problem solving). Each part is timed, with the quantitative portion being slightly longer (VR is 20 minutes for 10 questions, QR is 30 minutes for 20 questions), adding up to a 50 minute exam. The total score is the sum of the two sections, and ranges from 0 to 15. 

The assessment is delivered through Proctor U in a secure, online environment. This test cannot be taken in a public space and you will need to follow strict guidelines laid out in advance by GMAC and Proctor U to maintain the test's integrity.