Master Of The GMAT: After Three 800 Scores, GMAC Banned Him From Taking The Test Again

‘TEST TAKING TRAPS ARE CLEVER AND IMPORTANT…THEY ARE NOT UNFAIR’

Rather than be outraged at the traps he has discovered in the test, Edmonds instead expresses an unbridled fondness for them. “It’s a game,” he avows. “I find that most of the people who are really good at test prep are actually good at reverse engineering the thought behind the test. That is what research and development are about, it’s about looking at the released test items and how the test works and figuring out how they create their traps and what kinds of patterns are there to the traps they create.”

A common trap, he explains, is the choice between two answers, one that a test taker would immediately perceive to be the correct choice while the other, actually correct answer, is deliberately opaque. “If you have your two statements, you might pick A because it seems right when answer B seems weird and confusing even though it is correct. If GMAC didn’t do that, they would have an invalid test because the people who don’t know what they are doing would get the right answer as often as the people who know what they’re doing. About 80% of people pick A in that question. We can’t have 80% of the people who don’t know what they’re doing get the thing right. The pattern I am describing for you is that the A answer is obviously sufficient. It’s not hard math to recognize it’s sufficient. Hard math is required to recognize the more difficult statement. If you make A the right answer, it’s an easy question and not a hard question. It is a trap.”

He vehemently disagrees that such traps, purposely designed to fool applicants, are patently unfair. “Test making traps are clever and important,” insists Edmonds. “I don’t think they’re unfair. If you are going to have data sufficiency on the test, which isn’t about solving but recognizing problems, you have to have traps because otherwise, it would be much harder to get people to miss questions. And you have to get people to miss questions, otherwise, your test isn’t creating the differentiation between students.”

INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENTS AROUND THE FAMILY DINNER TABLE WERE BLOOD SPORT

His prodigious curiosity was nurtured at his family’s dining room table in Muncie, Ind. His mother was a professor of British Literature, an expert on mid-20th century metaphysical novelists including Iris Murdoch and Anthony Powell, while his father was a U.S. history professor, a Vietnam War historian. “Our dinner table conversations were fascinating,” reveals Edmonds. “Dad was a sophist, taking the opposite positions from other people for the fun of it. The intellectual arguments were blood sport in my family.”

Edmonds would go on to Washington University in St. Louis to major in comparative literature and Spanish, then move to Atlanta to work on a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Emory University. In the mid-1990s, he began tutoring students for the GMAT in Atlanta for The Princeton Review to earn extra income. It was on a trip to New York to learn how to tutor law school applicants for the LSAT that he had attracted attention from the test prep firm’s leaders. Initially, Edmonds was asked to develop study materials for both the LSAT and GMAT on a freelance basis.

Though The Princeton Review was founded many years earlier in 1981, its success was largely due to SAT prep. When the GMAT and GRE went from a paper-and-pencil test to a computer adaptive test in 1997, the stakes were rising and the Review needed to launch an R&D department to get a handle on how it should update its teaching on the tests. “At first, they all but offered me a job for the LSAT but then found someone they liked better,” recalls Edmonds. Instead, he got the job to become director of R&D for both the GMAT and the GRE. Six years into his Ph.D., but still without a dissertation, he quit and moved to New York in 1999 and never really looked back, sometimes to the chagrin of his parents.

AFTER AN INTERVIEW WITH MALCOLM GLADWELL, HIS PARENTS SAW THE LEGITIMACY OF HIS JOB

“They have gone through a series of feelings about this,” he sighs. “My dad once told me he always thought I was meant for more than just tutoring. But I think earlier this year when I was interviewed by (New Yorker writer and bestselling author) Malcolm Gladwell, my parents started to see the legitimacy of what I do.” Gladwell’s interview with Edmonds will likely debut on one of the writer’s podcasts next month.

He left The Princeton Review in 2010, agreeing to become employee number two at Noodle, a company launched by Princeton Review founder John Katzman. As the newly appointed manager of Noodle’s tutoring business, Edmonds brought with him the first seven tutors. Today, he no longer manages anyone other than himself, and Noodle Pros now boasts 122 tutors in 22 states and four countries, making it the largest test prep tutoring firm in the world. Edmonds typically tutors 15 to 20 students at any given time, though he has juggled as many as 25 to 30 during peak periods.

As befits most exceptionally bright persons, Edmonds has an eclectic mind and passions. Fluent in Spanish, he also dabbles in French, Italian and German languages. A self-described “culture whore,” he is equally at home playing video games on a computer or wandering the halls of the Whitney Museum of American Art. A movie-going and TV-watching fan of The Avengers and Game of Thrones, he believes that we are living in the best television age ever. “If I needed a book suggestion for summer reading for my 12-year-old daughter who is into the theater, I’d go to him,” says Neill Seltzer, CEO of Noodle Pros. “If I needed a recommendation for a good bar in Ibiza or wanted to know how to move my GMAT score from a 710 to a 760, I would go to Dan without hesitation. How many people can you say that about?”

‘HE HAS TRULY MASTERED THE TEST. HE KNOWS THE INNER WORKINGS OF IT’

More often than not, his clients are students who have already scored well on the exam and want to get an extra 30 to 50 points to gain an edge. A female management consultant in New York, who prefers not to give her name, came to him with a 730 earned when she had taken the GMAT as a senior during her undergraduate years. As a traditional applicant in the highly competitive consulting pool, she wanted to get to 750. She began working with Edmonds last year, meeting him in person once a week for 15 to 20 times until retaking the test earlier this year.

Her MBA admissions consultant recommended Edmonds, and he was not exactly what she expected, having had a tutor for the SAT and for the GMAT earlier. “Dan’s style is very different,” she says. “He doesn’t really teach you the concepts or how to solve the problems. He teaches you how to get to the right answer. My first tutor spent time jogging my memory on algebra and geometry but Dan’s time is spent on how to break the test and figure out the psychology behind it.

“He has truly mastered the test. He knows the inner workings of it. He knows exactly what they are testing. It’s not that he has a beautiful solution to a problem. He knows what is being tested and knows what the right answers are going to be and what they aren’t. You are paying him $500 an hour to get the strategies and the mental and endurance to get you through a three and one-half hour test. You are not going to solve the problem in the traditional sense with him and you need to be open to that.”

‘IT NEVER FELT LIKE WORK. I LOOKED FORWARD TO BEING WITH HIM’

Working with Edmonds, say his clients, feels more like meeting with a friend. Honestly, “It never felt like work,” adds the consultant who is applying to the top five MBA programs in round one this year. “I looked forward to being with him. He is so funny and uplifting. He is very casual, bubbling and charismatic. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. There were times when we would meet in the park just to get out of the conference room and brighten the mood. He keeps you grounded and reminds you that you already have a good score. ‘We’re just trying to get you a bit higher,’ he’ll say. ‘This is not the end of the world.’”

Michael Gullo worked with Edmonds during the summer of 2017 and had a rather spectacular outcome. “I hadn’t taken a math class since high school and my bachelor’s degree is in music performance so I didn’t think a high score was in the cards,“ he says, “but Dan helped me improve my initial GMAT score by over 200 points, bringing me to over 700. Dan is a great match for students who are really eager to get the most out of their tutoring sessions. I was happy to find that the more work I put in studying between sessions, the further Dan was able to take me. I wasn’t ready for just how effective his lessons would be.”

When Gullo got his massive improvement, it was better than what he had achieved on any of his many practice tests. Edmond’s response: “‘Holy crap, that does not suck!’ I couldn’t have done it without him,” says Gullo. “Dan is not only a brilliant teacher but also a great guy who’s fun to be around. The first meeting will be both sides feeling each other out to make sure that it’ll be a good working experience, something I really appreciated as it helped me feel surer that Dan was the right tutor for me.”

Edmonds isn’t shy to render an opinion on just about anything. As he sees it, there are really three major concerns he has with the test. One is what he believes is the lack of consistency from test to test taken by the same student. Edmonds maintains that it is not uncommon to see variations of up to 100 points between tests. “I think that is deeply problematic,” he says. “They test a whole bunch of different math concepts but the first five to seven questions are disproportionately important. So if they test your weak areas in those early questions, you are going to get a bad result. And it could be only because those questions are not in your wheelhouse. It makes people take the test a lot more than they otherwise would, particularly when a higher score gives you a real edge.”

His second concern is the test’s actual relevance to MBA admissions. “Is it a fair piece to have in the process at all?” he asks. “I haven’t done any kind of in-depth study and as far as I am aware nothing’s been done since a 2005 University of California study that tracked SAT scores against the performance of its students. It almost led the UC system to drop the SAT because the study found it had very, very marginal value. My very strong suspicion is that the verbal portion tracks not at all because it doesn’t really test anything. It tests a weird notion of reading comprehension for college graduates from good schools who went on to get good jobs. It tests a very narrow band of critical reasoning which I’ve seen no evidence that it is particularly important to anyone in business. It tests grammar. Who gives a rat’s ass about grammar. Have you read business emails?”

 

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