Dave Halliday

Teaches at Veritas Prep

Education:
BA, Stanford 
MBA, Yale

What do you love about teaching?
I love two things: the "aha" moments when students get a core concept and getting word from former students that they beat their target score. In the classroom it's easy to tell whether students are getting it: frowns get turned upside down and faces brighten. Online, this can be a bit tougher to gauge.  Students tend to be a bit reticent, so I'll usually interpret "yeah...." as sign that we need to go over the material one more time. If I get back an exclamation point or an emoticon, that's when I know the class has it.

Which movie/TV character would do best on the GMAT and why?
It's a common misperception that Sherlock Holmes only uses deductive logic. While his skills of deduction would allow him to wreck shop on Inference and Data Sufficiency questions, that alone doesn't guarantee a top GMAT score.  He also commonly uses inductive logic - creating and testing hypotheses while gathering facts to narrow down the range of possible solutions to a crime. This would give him an edge on gap-spotting on Strengthen/Weaken problems, finding the purpose in Reading Comprehension questions, and narrowing down the possible strategies for Problem Solving questions. If Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) and Jonny Lee Miller (Elementary) went head-to-head, I think the more socially unaware portrayal by Cumberbatch would win because he would never let his intuition get in the way of his logic.