GMAT HERO

My name is Lu XU. My English name is Lewis.

A few highlights:

• MA, MBA, and MD
• Worked as a chemistry teacher for City College, CUNY
• Worked as a Research Scientist in Molecular Biology Department of Mount Sinai Medical Center
• Worked as a GMAT teacher in Kaplan

Our business's mission statement:

Kill GMAT! Kill them all!

Our Business

GMAT is a game. I personally enjoy the the thrill to beat GMAT under thorough calculation.

When my students study with me, it is like that we go hunting. We see beautiful scenary in GMAT test.

I do GMAT teaching mainly for fun. Teaching GMAT is my hobby. I celebrate my past in teaching GMAT.

Who We Are

I am a hero of GMAT. I am a walking legend in GMAT world. What happened to me can be made into a movie like "Catch me if you can!" or "21" or "the Wolf of Wall Street".

I was too intelligent for my own good before. I was highly influenced by Nihilism and Superman Theory in Nietzsche's philosophy when I was young. I truly believed that I was beyond good and evil. I was like a powerful and unstoppable machine which was just stopped by shear force and catastrophy.

Now I am very happy with my normal life. The only thing that I want to do now is to help other people have an easy and happy life free from the suppression and torment by GMAT.

About the Myth: 

GMAT math teachers who were educated in China are the best in the market. 

The myth is the truth. Theoretically speaking, in China any Chinese student, who graduates from a junior high school (9th grade in the USA), could score above 80 percentile in a GMAT math test. Any Chinese student who graduates from a high school in China is qualified to be a GMAT math teacher in the USA. The only problem for Chinese is the English language barrier. Otherwise lots of American GMAT math teachers will be out of job.

Let's see the analysis from the test-maker's official website (GMAC.com).

Speaking of the top of the Quantitative Scorers, 3% getting the max score seems a bit high. Let's examine what's going on: (the following distribution graphs come from this great tool from GMAC.com)

Here's the Verbal Scores:

A nice normal curve, max and min's are rare, and the mean is also the mode.

Now for the Quantitative:
 

Which doesn't look nearly as normal, the most frequent score is not the maximum, but it's close.  And the max extreme of 51 is more frequent than each scores less than 23, this is not an ideal distribution.

Now lets look at Quantitative Scores from Americans:

Here we have a relatively normal distribution, the mean is the mode, and the extremes are rare.

Let's look at GMAT Quantitative scores from international test takers:

This is rather shocking, the Chinese and other Asian test takers score really well... And since the gmat is getting more popular internationally, this explains why the total curve is getting top-heavy today.

In 2010, 30,264 GMAT tests were taken by Chinese citizens (out of china's population of 1.3 billion), and 127,061 Americans took the test in that period (out of our population of 0.31 billion).

This is why so many test-takers (3%) got a perfect 51 on the Quantitative section of the GMAT these days.

For more info on the GMAT, check out MBA.com and GMAC.com

Why Chinese are so good at math? Are they smarter in math than us Americans?

Chinese are not smarter than Americans. The key for their excellence in math lies in a different training methodology in Chinese education system. In all Chinese elementary,  junior, and senior high schools, a calculator is considered as a contraband. Sometimes even scratch paper is not allowed. Can you tell me immediately the results of 11^2, 12^2, 13^2, 14^2, 15^2, 16^2, 17^2, 18^2, 19^2, and 25^2? Then try any Chinese student you can see. A Chinese student cannot remember the results of those calculations will be looked down upon by peers at school. 

I came from China in 1994. I came to study in a Ph.D program of Biochemistry. When I taught college students in a chemistry class, I always did fast calculation in my head and sometimes when I pointed out mistakes in my students' calculation, they would claim that they got the results from calculators. Then I told them either they used the calculator wrongly or the calculator was broken. Then after careful re-calculation, they got the correct results. So lots of my students called me a genius. I felt very embarrassed because I am just a normal Chinese man.

Now I am a American of a Chinese origin. I bring with me the Chinese math teaching methodology to share with you. I will bring all of you to the success you never imagined before.