A student prepping for a test
Desperate to get a leg up on the competition, students and their parents spent a record $1 billion on test prep services last year. Most of that money went to improve the chances of high school students to get into highly ranked undergraduate schools.
And who can blame them? Everyone wants an edge. Many equate how much you spend with how much you care. So parents are eager to reach into their pockets and pay whatever it takes to get junior into a school that can set someone up for a successful life.
But a good deal of the $1 billion was also spent on tutors, classes and software platforms by applicants to get into graduate school, particularly the elite MBA programs that effectively guarantee six-figure salaries at graduation. The cost of graduate school is high enough to justify a few thousand dollars to help boost a young professional’s score on either the GMAT or the GRE, the two exams used by most business schools in their admissions decisions.
Just nine classroom sessions for GMAT help at Manhattan Prep, a leading test prep firm, would set you back a minimum of $1,699. An online version of the same course is priced at $1,399, while the firm’s GMAT Boot Camp, with 35 hours of instruction over two to three weeks, costs between $2,699 and $5,510 (the cost of an in-person small classes of six students).
At the high end, a master GMAT tutor can charge $500 an hour for his or her services. Tutor Dan Edmonds of Noodle Pros is so well-known for his testing-taking prowess ithat he was once offered his choice of $50,000 or a Corvette to take the LSAT for a client who hoped to get into an elite law school. The last time he took the GMAT, the staffer who checked him into the Sylvan Learning Center where the test was administered, asked Edmonds if he would take the test for him.
Getting a 30-to-50 point increase in a GMAT score could easily be worth nearly $1 million in lifetime earnings for an MBA-bound test taker. That’s because a higher score can open the doors to the kind of elite business schools that can place someone on the track to the top one percent.Depending on your starting score, getting a 30-to-50 point increase on a GMAT test could easily be worth nearly $1 million in lifetime earnings for an MBA-bound test taker. That’s because studies have shown that a higher score can open the doors to the kind of elite business schools that can place someone on the track to the top one percent.
So it’s worth asking how effective are these firms in helping applicants boost their scores? Which firms in the $1 billion industry do the best job? Is a private one-on-one tutor better than a class or a software platform?
To find the answers to this question, PoetsandQuants.com recently surveyed users of test prep services in a major study of the effectiveness of GMAT prep by firm. One surprising discovery: Students who used test prep classes were able to increase their GMAT scores by 93.7 points. Those who used tutors reported a 90.2 increase in their final score. However, test takers who got the biggest boost were those who used both a class and a tutor. They averaged increases of 100 points on the GMAT test.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, was the finding that the more time you spend studying for the exam, the better you do on it. Student who 11 to 20 hours with a tutor or a class were able to improve their GMAT scores by 76.2 points. Those who devoted 21 to 30 hours averaged an 88-point boost. Test takers who gave it 31 to 40 hours got a 90.7 point improvement. Students who really dug in and prepped for more than 40 hours achieved the highest increase: 93.7 points.
The big takeaway: Like it or not, test prep works as long as you are willing to put in the time. It’s another sign that the competition to get into a great school is not exactly fair because people who have the money to get the best test prep are likely to have an advantage over others who can’t afford thousands of dollars for a test prep firm.
