SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, balloons taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. From classroom teacher to one of the most influential test prep instructors on the internet, Greg Matt has built a global student base by undercutting multi-billion dollar test prep companies and teaching something most of them won't, how to actually understand the test. He's got over 172,000 followers, a subscription platform that costs a fraction of what Kaplan charges, and some sharp opinions on why the test prep industry is broken. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college prep without wasting thousands of dollars and years of time. And the answer usually involves finding the people who have figured out the rules of the game that schools aren't telling you. That's why I'm thrilled to have Greg Matt here today. Greg is the founder and lead instructor of Greg Matt, one of the most respected independent test prep platforms in the world. He started as a classroom teacher and built a platform that's disrupted the high-cost tutoring industry by serving students globally at a fraction of what corporate prep companies charge. He's a specialist on the GRE and the TOEFL with 172,000 followers on X. And his whole methodology is built on something that we're going to get into today teaching students how to actually understand the test instead of just memorizing and using tricks to do that. We're going to dive into how one teacher disrupted a multi-billion dollar industry and what most what most test prep companies get wrong. And what every parent that's preparing their kid for an AP or SAT AP exam can learn from how Greg teaches. Greg, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Yeah. So I've given them the highlight reel, but kind of give us the 60-second snapshot of like who you are, what specific problem you solve, and how this all started from a classroom teacher to where you are now.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

So if we go back to my childhood, I've always loved testing. Like I was the kid who would pay money to get my test results early. Like that's how much I enjoyed it. I I remember even as a six or seven-year-old taking these kind of standardized exams, you know, a state standardized exam. I think it was Florida, and just really kind of enjoying the process and enjoying testing in general. And I really loved school throughout my whole life. I loved learning. And I didn't realize I wanted to be a teacher. Like I was exploring other career opportunities, engineering, lawyer. But then once I started teaching almost as like a side job, it turned into a passion, it turned into a love. And I wasn't teaching testing at first. I was just teaching various subjects, English and things like that to international students. But once I got into testing, I was kind of combining two loves of mine, you know, the love of testing and the love of teaching. And then that worked for a while because I was part of the kind of ecosystem that already existed. And I started feeling problems with it or issues with it. And I thought that I would just try something on my own. And the goal wasn't necessarily to disrupt, the goal was just to help even one or two people, or just to have something to do, like almost like an experiment. And I've been very fortunate and lucky that it has taken off the way it has. But I would say that's probably the 60-second version of what I'm about.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Gotcha. So I guess what did you ultimately decide to leave the classroom? Like what puts you over the edge?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Probably reach would be the biggest one. If you're in a classroom, it just doesn't scale. I mean, I love being in the classroom. I mean, don't get me wrong. And in many ways, it's preferable to teaching online or to having some kind of distance between the teacher and the student. But if your goal is reach and your goal is disruption, it's probably impossible to do that in the classroom.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Interesting. So you just didn't feel like you were making the as big of impact as you potentially could?

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Yeah, I would say that was one thing that was on my mind. Another thing that's on my mind is classroom infrastructure in the way that the ecosystem is set up, whether it's in universities or even like kind of third-party test prep uh companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review, if you have a physical classroom, almost by design, it becomes expensive, right? You have to rent an office or a classroom. There has to be physical books. People have to commute. And not only that, it's more expensive and in many ways less effective. Now, having a teacher in front of you who can answer questions and there's live interaction, obviously that's going to be more effective, right? Than even live teaching online. So that's not what I'm referring to. I'm more referring to what happens once the classroom instruction is done. A lot of students in a classroom system, they kind of feel like the classroom is the learning. That's enough. But if you have an online platform, you can kind of actually walk them through their entire day. Like, you know, you say for the next four to five hours, this is what you're doing. And that's not really possible in a classroom. Another thing is the classroom doesn't allow for various tools, like online learning tools that are extremely helpful. One example is on our website, we have something called the vocab mountain, which essentially is this kind of re like reinforcement learning tool that students use every single day to not only memorize the vocab, but to actually retain it. Because I took four years of Spanish in high school, four years of Spanish. So you would think that I would be nearly fluent or at least conversational. And the truth of the matter is I don't speak any Spanish at all. And I've lived in places with large Spanish-speaking communities, and I still don't speak any Spanish. So a lot of pedagogy in the current market and in the current world, it's really good at teaching this stuff kind of in a short-term basis, but there's no kind of mechanism or tool that allows retention of this information. And in the classroom, especially, that's very, very difficult. But online, you can really hammer home this retention idea. So I find that there's a lot of advantages to teaching online, having an online platform, reach, scalability, affordability, and also just effectiveness.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

So you get started on test prep. Was your original intention to build a platform? Or did you like, did you have other jobs lined up? Did you tutor for anyone else? How did you get into just basically building your own company and platform?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

I was teaching at a university, and a lot of the students required various tests in order to either satisfy their conditional admissions or to gain admission to this university. And these tests can include the GRE, the GMAT, the TOEFL, the IELTS. TOFEL and IELTS, for those of you who don't know, they're essentially English proficiency tests. And so I was teaching testing in the classroom and really enjoyed it, really liked it. But then after maybe like three to four years, started to feel a little bit frustrated with it, mostly because I found it two issues with it. Very prohibitively expensive. Very, very prohibitively expensive, almost to the point where I started to feel guilty, almost like it was like blood money. Like if I charge somebody $200 an hour, I just started to feel dirty. Like, because the thing about a standardized exam like the GRE is you can never guarantee results because remember, the whole point of it is to rank people, to put them in order. You're first, your second, your third. And so everybody's trying to improve, right? It's not like people are just sitting on their butts. And so even if a student works very hard, does everything right, there's still the possibility that there is no improvement because, again, you're going against other people. Your score is determined in reference to other people. And so a lot of times in my tutoring, maybe a student would not be happy with their results. I felt bad. They felt bad. Everyone just kind of felt bad. And so I started just wanting, almost from my own peace of mind, to just put a lot of this tutoring stuff or this information I had about test pedagogy online on YouTube for free. And so that's really how it started. I just started making kind of YouTube videos and I was having fun with it too. I was, I was really enjoying the process of making the videos. So again, it was like a win-win. And the YouTube channel kind of took off, strangely took off in the sense that a test prep platform can, or test prep YouTube channel can. And then, you know, it got like 10,000 subscribers and then 20,000 and 30,000. And so then I started thinking, can I like springboard this into something bigger, like a platform? And then I started thinking, okay, what if I did test prep on like a subscription model for $5 a month? And it only started as live classes. So like there would be live classes, but people could join on Zoom. Zoom was a new platform, by the way. I was like one of the earliest adopters of Zoom, even pre-COVID. And I thought, okay, $5 a month, live classes, not a bad deal. And we can do maybe like 10 to 15 classes a week. And I did that and I advertised it on the YouTube channel. And I think I had like 200 signups, 300 signups that first day. And I'm like, oh my God, that's like a thousand bucks a month. That's like 1500 bucks a month. That's like beer money. That's great. That's going to be awesome. And then once we started getting a library of these live classes, we could then start making study plans. We could start making our own problems. We could start hiring people. And that's kind of been the process over the last, you know, five to six years. It's just constant iteration, constant improvement. And there wasn't like a grand vision, I guess is what I'm saying. It started as this free YouTube information, which then kind of led to these $5 a month live classes, which then allowed us to have a library, which allowed us to, you know, do this and do that and do this and do that. And that's kind of been the evolution of it.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

So the platform, is it is it all on YouTube, or is there an actual like there's an actual platform for students to go to?

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Oh, there's an actual platform, yeah. Gregmat.com. How did you how did you pull that? Oh, just trial and error? Yeah. Just like learning.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

No coding experience, anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

So I started with Squarespace, which, you know, you know, you you've heard the ads, right? Everyone's heard the ads. Squarespace, design your own website, which, you know, in hindsight, it's kind of garbage. The website, I mean, not necessarily the service. But it was also good for me at that time because it allowed me with, you know, zero coding experience. And by the way, I still have zero coding experience. I just have engineers now on the team, right? Right. It allowed me with no engineers and no coding experience to put something together, to put something together. And so once that happened, we started to get, you know, the occasional engineer who would reach out to me and be like, hey, I really enjoyed your classes or the service. I can help you with the engineering side of things. And it kind of led, it kind of like uh went from there to where I would get somebody who would help me with a small project. That person would do a good job engineering-wise. And then they would get a bigger project and then a bigger project. And before I know it, they're like a part-time engineer for Greg Matt. And then before I know it, they're like a full-time engineer for Greg Matt. And it's that's kind of how it developed. It developed in a very trilineaire, almost like scrappy way.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

So just or basically kind of organically through that whole process.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Super organically. And and not just that. I mean, we've started to experiment with a little bit of marketing over the past couple of months, but for the past five or six years, prior to that, we did absolutely zero marketing. It was all just word of mouth or just and another thing is like we wouldn't put testimonials on the site because I always found those rung a little bit hollow. Because of course, with a testimonial, someone's only gonna cherry pick the best ones, right? In fact, uh, I remember in the early stages of Greg Matt, I thought almost as a joke, I would put like negative testimonials on the site. Just like, yeah, this service didn't work for me. That was like how that was how kind of like dissatisfied I was with the test prep industry at the time. My views have kind of, yeah, my views have kind of evolved a bit over over time. But yeah, so we were super scrappy. And I would say only in the past year or two have we started to really kind of like, okay, if our goal is really reach and scalability, right? We probably need to start operationalizing this company a bit. We need to start operating in a way that allows us to set goals and achieve goals. And so I think over the past year or two, I've kind of moved away a bit from that scrappy attitude.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Interesting. So you don't do any no marketing, and this is just this is your service, basically. You got two different services. You built this entirely from scratch. That's that's pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Well, I don't want to say you as in me, because obviously. But there was a team for sure. But over the past two months or so, we have started to experiment with marketing, not in a way that's false, though. We're not spamming emails, we're not guaranteeing test scores. We're more kind of saying, okay, we have this goal to increase access to affordable education, right? That that's our goal. And at the same time, we want to iterate our product and we want to make it more effective from a pedagogical point of view. You know, our goal really is to kind of not change the way people learn because that seems a little bit pie in the sky. But let me put it this way, right? Like if you look at test scores of American students, they've declined or stagnated over the past two or three decades, which is kind of ironic because in theory, you have all of these tools available, like Khan Academy and all of these like educational apps. And and so in theory, in iPads, you know, like like students are getting iPads in the classroom and and stuff like that. So in theory, you would think if you were to go back to 2000 and be like, hey, do you think educational outcomes are going to improve over the next 26 years or decline? My guess is most people would say improve. And so clearly pedagogy is hard. Like I'm not, I'm not saying teachers are necessarily doing something wrong, or educators are doing something wrong, or curriculum designers are doing something wrong. But education is hard because even when you get a lot of smart people in a room saying, we want to improve outcomes for these students, it doesn't always work. So the cool thing about having your own platform is you get to kind of experiment with tools and methodologies that you wouldn't be allowed to experiment with if you were employed by somebody else.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

So let's get into the methodology. What is the methodology that makes Greg Matt work and so and makes you so successful?

SPEAKER_01 17:56

So I would say the first thing is just access, because test prep for a lot of people is very prohibitively expensive, especially those in international countries. You know, if you're asking somebody to pay $1,500 for a GRE prep course that meets once or twice a week, you know, for six hours, so three hours and three hours, and there's only like 10 to 12 sessions, you're asking them to pay money for something that is clearly going to be ineffective because improving on the GRE is not something that can be accomplished in 20 or 30 hours. Remember, that that would be like saying you're gonna learn French, right, to a conversational level in 10, three-hour classes. And yeah, you might learn some tricks and some tips and stuff like that, but you're not actually gonna have a solid base of French that you would need to be conversational. And the test prep industry operated like this for so long, so long, decades. Right. So there was kind of two threads. Thread number one was kind of this in-classroom instruction, but it wasn't very extensive. It was maybe 20 hours, 30 hours. And then thread number two was just like you would go to Barnes and Noble's or Borders when those bookstores were still around, and you would buy the official prep guide and you would try to self-study, right? You would try to self-study. And then with the rise of the internet, you obviously start getting these online platforms like Magush. Magush was a big disruptor. And in fact, they were kind of the original Greg Matt because they were charging only like $100 or $200. And then that was like really cheap at the time, right? That was like a big deal. So the first thing is just access, right? So that's that's what's prohibiting a lot of people from getting better at these tests. But access now is available and it's there. The second thing is, like I said, the effectiveness of a lot of these platforms, in my opinion, wasn't very effective. To get good at the GRE, you really have to go through a process, a progression. And the progression has to move in almost like a linear fashion. So let's talk about quant or math, for example. Before you even solve any math problems, you have to get a really solid math foundation. For the GRE, that's going to be in arithmetic, algebra, coordinate geometry, geometry, and what they call statistics or data analysis. And to do that, it's a lot of memorization, like a lot of memorization. You have to memorize formulas, what a median is, probability, the prime numbers, you know, up to 50. It's just a lot of almost vocabulary. Basically, it's math vocabulary. And a lot of times, a lot of these test prep platforms, they skip that part because they want to get to the cool stuff, the problem solving, the strategies and stuff like that. So the first thing is foundation, foundation, foundation, right? You know, off the location, location, location, you know, modern refrain we often hear. The second thing is strategies. Once you have this solid foundation, you have to actually learn how to approach these questions with a toolkit, basically. You have to imagine you're holding a tool bag, and in that tool bag is like 10 to 12 different tools. The thing is, though, you can't develop these tools on your own. You can maybe develop some of them on your own. You have to be taught them. You have to first become aware of them. And that's where like someone like a tutor becomes very useful. They first show you what the tools are, how they work, and then give you opportunities to start using them. Once you have the foundation and the strategies under your belt, you then move to untimed practice. Untimed practice, no time pressure, and you start with easy questions. If you dominate the easy question, And you're getting a perfect score or a nearly perfect score, you move to the medium questions. If you get a perfect score or a medium or like a nearly perfect score on the medium questions, you then have a choice. Do you go to hard untimed or do you go to easy timed? And, you know, there's really no wrong answer there. But the point is, is there's a very linear progression to test prep. Most people don't like to follow it because they just immediately want to get into the fun stuff, problem solving. You know, give me a practice test. If I do a thousand problems, eventually I'll get good at that. It doesn't work for tennis. It doesn't work for golf. If I gave you a thousand golf balls a day and I said, you have a year, after a year, you would still be terrible at golf. So the test prep approach for so many years, in my opinion, has been ineffective.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focused on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supportedtutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. What makes it effective in what you do? And how have you been able to capture data to support that?

SPEAKER_01 23:33

So I would say there's probably a lot of cases where Greg Matt was not effective. Test prep is hard, and it really requires a lot of kind of willpower of the student to sit there and memorize all of this foundation stuff in the beginning and to kind of move in this linear progression, or even to kind of like just disabuse themselves of old habits. Because a lot of students come into the test space thinking, I just want to solve a thousand problems and eventually I'll get good at it. Eventually I'll get good at it. And then you say to them, that's not really the best way to prepare. You know, you shouldn't do that. And it's very difficult for a human, including myself, by the way, to take advice. Like if you look at me and you say, hey, you shouldn't drink that beer. Alcohol's not good for you. I'm going to agree with you, right? But I'm still probably going to do it. If you tell somebody you should go to the gym four times a week and walk at least 10,000 steps a day, you're not going to disagree with me. You're not going to say, oh, that's terrible advice. But you're probably not going to follow it. Not you specifically, the general view, right? Gotcha. So we have we, of course, find this to be the case in a lot of test prep. So I would say in in many cases, test prep, even on the Greg Matt platform, is not effective because it does require buy-in from the student. It does require a lot of buy-in from the student. But in terms of what data I have to back up that Greg Matt is effective, I wouldn't call it necessarily like hard data with like a peer-reviewed study, but there's just really strong word of mouth. Like I said, the platform took off with zero marketing. So obviously people were finding it effective. People were finding it enjoyable. We have a lot of testimonials. We don't publish them on the site, but if you search, for example, Greg Matt Reddit, you'll find a lot of like, you know, success stories and things like that. We get a lot of success stories posted to our support channel and our email channel. But I really do want to hammer home the point that in these standardized exams, remember, the entire way they work is they're a ranking system. So even if you improve, remember, everybody else is trying to improve too. Everyone's trying to improve simultaneously. So jumping from like a, let's say, a 310 on the GRE, which is an above-average score, but not a great score, to a 330, which is when you start getting into elite scores, like fractions of 1% kind of thing, it's possible. It's possible, but it's a little bit different than a test that is not measured against other people, where you really you're just competing against yourself, right? You're just saying, if I can get better at this, I can get a high score. But in a test like the GRE, because it's standardized and it's normalized against other people, you really have to do things the right way to move the needle a significant amount. And like I said, we've had a lot of feedback from users and a lot of word of mouth that in many cases we have been able to do that. But I don't want to say that that's true in 100% of cases, because test prep just doesn't work that way. For many years, I said, you know, no guarantees in test prep, no guarantees in test prep. And that's why I found one part of the industry a little bit scammy was kind of score guarantees. But once you dive into the fine details about how to even get the refund, you realize it's just a marketing tactic.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

So because um, do you know who Alex Ramosi is? No. So he's a pretty big entrepreneur in the space. He talked about before he started the company that made him like multimillionaire, he was also considering a test prep company. And one of the things was like he talks about how he got really good at the GRE, and it really just came down to he bought every test prep book imaginable for the GRE and took thousands and thousands of practice questions. So to your point, it takes time and you have to be consistent. But for a person that's scrambling and worried that the GRE is coming up and that they have procrastinated, where should they start? Like what should they do with limited time to get ready?

SPEAKER_01 28:03

The first place would be what we call diagnostic foundation quizzes. Because remember, there's this progression timeline. And I don't know where you are on that timeline, and you probably don't know where you are on that timeline. So again, let's use math as an example. Let's say somebody comes up to me and they say, My test is in a month. I don't know where to begin. So, what I'll do is I'll just first ask them, I'll say, How strong is your math? Are you a math person? And if they say no, then I'll basically start them at the very beginning. I'll say, okay, you're going to go through on our website what we call the I'm overwhelmed plan, which will build up your math basics and things like that, and start them at the very beginning of that timeline. If they say yes, I am a math person, I don't just take their word for it. I say, great, please take these five quizzes. You can take them untimed. Please don't look anything up, right? We want to get an honest diagnosis and we want to actually confirm that your math foundation is strong. In many cases, it's not. See, remember, people are very bad at self-diagnosis, right? Me included. And in that case, again, I start them at the very beginning. But in some cases, their math actually is strong. I mean, their foundation is strong. Maybe they only have to study like geometry or something like that. Arithmetic, algebra, data, they can kind of skip that part. And so then we move them to the next step of the progression timeline, which would be strategies and just kind of start them from there. So that's really the best way if you're going to approach the test in kind of a time crunch. You have to actually find out where you are on that timeline so you can make wise decisions. If your test is like a week away, right, and you've done zero preparation, usually what I'll say is, okay, we're going to use this upcoming test as the diagnostic tool. This will be our diagnostic tool. And then we're going to prepare the right way for attempt number two or attempt number three.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

So what have you found has changed over the years preparing students for the GRE and other tests versus like what has what has kind of stayed the same?

SPEAKER_01 30:23

What has changed is people are getting better at the test because people understand it more, people are more aware of strategies, people are understand, or people understand more about this kind of like foundation building aspect they have to do before. They understand about the vocabulary that they have to memorize and the quant foundation stuff that they have to memorize. So people are legitimately getting better at the test, especially with the math. On the GRE, we've seen the math scores. Like I think 10% of people are now getting a perfect score on the test. Some of that has to do with some changes that are happening and who's taking the test. But also, I just think people are getting are getting better at it. So that has definitely been a big change. The affordability has been a big change. I mean, not just with Greg Mat, with other online platforms as well. It used to be really, like I said, cost prohibitive. Like really. Like some tutors for the GRE and GMET charge like lawyer prices, three, four, five hundred dollars an hour, which kind of just baffles me because no matter how good the tutor is, I just can't imagine getting $400 worth of value in that hour. Because, like I said, doing this test the right way is a commitment. And one hour is only a very small slice of that commitment. So affordability has been a big change. What else has changed in the test prep industry? You know, we've seen kind of this movement for test optional or people claiming the tests are unfair. I totally get the sentiment. And I get where it's coming from, especially because for many years it was so unaffordable. I guess I would push back a little bit and suggest that in many ways these tests are the fairest part of an application. Because if we look at other metrics of an application, GPA, letters of recommendation, statements of purpose, personal statements, things like that, especially with the rise of AI, everybody's going to be sending in polished letters of recommendation and polished statements of purpose and polished personal statements. And GPA is a pretty subjective measurement, depending on what school you went to. And that also, that also has a big effect about affordability, right? If a parent can afford tutors, then of course the GPA is going to be higher. So the GRE, just to use one example, in many ways is the fairest part of an application. So I wanted to push back a little bit against kind of that anti-test movement because, you know, be careful what you wish for. If you remove the GRE from the application process, you're making it more subjective and in some ways more unfair than it was previously. That's not to say that the GRE is perfect. Okay. It has its biases and its its issues. But it what has stayed the same in the test prep industry is that they measure, they they've always measured the same skills. See the same skills, basically reasoning. These tests always measure reasoning. And the and the way it works is you first have to memorize this foundation stuff, whether it's vocabulary, quant. And once you have that memorized, you then have to start doing like the thinking part of the test. You have to start, okay, if A equals B and B equals C, what can you infer? What can you conclude from that? You know, A equals C, right? So that's really what has stayed the same over decades, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Okay. The test anxiety is big in both of our industries. And uh, you know, I kind of describe test anxiety, even though I obviously acknowledge anxiety exists. A lot of test anxiety comes from a lack of preparation. And that's just the sheer volume of it under the exact conditions of the test are not present. What is your take on it? I think that's a big effect.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Yeah. We have a class, or I guess a recording, we should call it, called Managing Time for the New GRE. And it teaches you that if you come across any kind of question that gives you difficulty, we have this strategy called the three skipping periods. If you come across a question that has like a large paragraph or like an intimidating equation, just skip it. Just go to the next question. If you, if you read the question, so that's the first skipping period. If you read the question and you're just like, what? Like, what is this even talking about? Skip it. Go to the next question. And then finally, the third skipping period is you looked at the question, you were not intimidated, you read it, you think you understand it, you start solving it, but you hit this kind of wall. Like after a minute or two, you kind of go, oh crap, where do I go from here? Move on. A lot of test anxiety comes from people not following that advice. They linger on a question that is difficult for them, and then they start to panic. They start to panic. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And before they know it, they look at the clock. There's only five minutes left and they have seven questions remaining, right? Well, why? That's because you were lingering on hard questions that you should have just skipped and returned to. The irony, of course, being a lot of times when you skip these questions and then go to easier questions or questions you know how to solve, it calms you down, right? It calms you down, it gives you a confidence boost. And then when you go back to the harder questions, a lot of times they're just solvable. They're just easy. You're like, oh, okay, oh, how did I miss that the first time, right? So I agree with you. A lot of it is just putting yourself in timed conditions, but also having kind of an intention about it, like a strategy. Time management is something that has to be worked on deliberately. It's not necessarily something that is going to come organically or naturally. But I think a lot of other test anxiety is the result of people fearing what failure says about them. So if I do poorly on this GRE, am I stupid? I studied for 200 hours for this and I failed or I got a low score. What does that say about me? That says that I'm a loser, my parents are going to be very upset, especially in high-pressure educational environments and a lot of international countries. They have tie a lot of their identity to how they perform academically. And again, ironically, this makes them perform worse academically, because the people who perform the best academically are going to be the ones who are not afraid of experimenting, who are not afraid of failure. So, for example, they take a test, they get a result they're not happy with, and they go, huh, that's interesting. Why? Why did that happen? And they kind of analyze their mistakes from a very kind of analytical point of view. These people are going to be very good at just improvement, and they're not going to have test anxiety because in many ways they embrace failure. They like low scores. So I think test anxiety is the result of those two things. The first thing, like you said, but I also think it kind of points to a bigger identity insecurity that people don't want to reveal some truth about themselves. But remember, that's only because they're assuming that the result is somehow tied to their identity. If you get rid of that assumption, you're no longer scared of failure. You embrace failure. You love failure.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

So embracing failure is something that kind of goes against what the education system is set up, set up for, right? I mean, because we're taught that failure is wrong, it's bad, but really it is, you know, in business and in life, it's it's an iterative process. If you you really only fail if you give up. So is that your is that how you take on the test prep, the test prep process with your students?

SPEAKER_01 38:42

Oh, yeah. I I told them to say, so when we say embrace failure, we're not saying fail intentionally. And we're definitely not saying give up. I mean, obviously give up if you want to move on to different things, you know, bigger and better things for you. But when we say embrace failure, that is whenever you get a result you're unhappy with or you get a problem wrong, a lot of times people's first instinct is to jump to the identity issue. What does this say about me? I'm so stupid. I'll never get good at this test. You know, we hear these kind of things all the time, right? So when we say embrace failure, what we say, what we mean by that is pause and then go, huh, that's odd. Why, why did I choose that? What is my evidence? Why did I not choose the right answer? Why did I exclude the right answer? So that's what we mean by embrace failure. Like you said, this iterative process where I mean, even in Greg Matt, Greg Matt became what it is today because over the past six or seven years, there was this massive trial and error process, right? Right. Some things worked, some things didn't work. The same is true of getting good at these tests. But again, I'm going to go back to the to the my main kind of priority is before you begin this iterative embrace failure problem-solving process. It's very important that these students acquire that foundation first, you know, the quant foundation or the vocabulary in the case of the GRE. Once you have that strong foundation, you can then kind of go into this reasoning embrace failure part of the process.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

Gotcha. Okay. So kind of switching gears here, if we move over to if we move over to like rapid fire, lightning round questions. So this will just be, you know, first thing that comes to mind, no explanation necessary. Unless you want to. What's the most overrated test prep advice you hear right now? Solve thousands of questions. What's the most overrated study habit you hear? Solve thousands of questions. How about one thing parents overthink about test prep?

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Forcing your child to do something is probably not the best approach. You want to explain to your child what the process is, how to get good at this test, and get them to a point where they're kind of enjoying the reasoning part of it and the gamified part of it rather than forcing them to do this, that's probably not going to be the best approach to test prep for your child.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Okay. What about one thing parents underthink about test prep?

SPEAKER_01 41:49

The importance of retaining the information they learn. So if you get your child or student to do all this great work and memorize all this stuff, this foundation stuff, remember they have to retain that information. If they just lose it two weeks or three weeks later, it's a huge waste of time. So in the test prep process, make sure that there's some kind of retention mechanism that they keep reinforcing the stuff they've already learned. And I don't mean solving questions. Again, I'm getting to that memorization point. Have they memorized all of the arithmetic rules and the algebra rules and all that stuff?

SPEAKER_00 42:31

And then what about if something you could say one thing to a student about to take a high-stakes test, what would it be? Embrace failure.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Yeah. Don't tie it to your identity. If you get a low score, be excited about it. And in and instead of freaking out about it, ask yourself why? What happened? And then follow that kind of progression timeline that I've been talking about.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

And for a parent listening right now, what's one thing? If you could give a parent one piece of advice listening, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 43:08

One piece of advice for a parent. I would say again, get your child into a mindset where education is something they choose to do, not something you're forcing them to do. Find something where they can kind of blossom and something that they can choose themselves. And in the test prep world or in the educational world, you can encourage them to kind of pursue interests. A lot of feedback we get with Greg Matt is they say, I didn't know test prep could be fun. I didn't know test prep could be interesting. And the reason why they think that is because they're actually learning skills and techniques that can be applied to a wide variety of things. They're actually seeing the usefulness of it. So it really approach the your kid's passions and your child's passions in that way. I find it to be quite sad that there's this hostile relationship between parents and children in so many cases where the parents feel like they have to force the kid to do something and the kid feels a lot of resentment. So yeah, I think that would be my advice.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

Okay, great. This has been really eye-opening. It's nice to talk to someone in the graduate test prep industry and just realize a lot of the similarities and crossovers that we have. So I appreciate your time and coming on the podcast. For anyone listening out there that wants to learn more about you and your company and what you offer, where should they find you? You could just go to gregmat.com. All right. Cool. And um any last piece of advice you want to give or last something for their listeners to remember before we sign off?

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Yeah, I would say the last piece of advice when it comes to the test prep industry is take, for example, somebody like Messi, you know, the soccer player, the football player. Did he become who he is by just playing football matches? No, right? He became the way he is by focusing on technique and foundation and fitness and, you know, all of that stuff. And then that translated into the football matches, into who he is today. Test prep is the same thing. People don't become who they are, like good test prep people, by just taking practice exam after practice exam after practice exam. You can, of course, find people like that. Remember, we're we're we're generalizing here. We're generalizing. Instead, approach it in a much more foundational technique, skill-based strategy way, and then allow those skills to translate to the test itself.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

All right. Well, thank you all uh for listening. Remember, you don't have to play the game the way the industry sees it, the right method beats the most expensive course every time. Skills over tricks, understanding over memorization. Same story we tell every week. Uh, links to Greg Matt are gonna be in the show notes in the description. Again, thank you all for tuning in to the Supported Learning Podcast, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Greg. Thank you. You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education.