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

‘STANDARDIZED TESTING IS GROTESQUELY BIASED’

He feels differently about the math part of the test. “The data sufficiency questions are really interesting and can show something about your facility with numbers and whether you understand math,” says Edmonds. “They are beautiful little puzzles. A lot of the questions can’t be solved the right way in two minutes. So they are looking for a certain kind of agility with numbers, and that might actually have some relevance. Whether that something is relevant to business school is an open question.”

And finally, he strongly believes that the test is biased against minorities and women. “Standardized testing is grotesquely biased on multiple axes in my opinion,” he maintains. “There is no end of studies that show this. There is a racial bias that has been documented again and again that goes beyond socio-economics. There is gender bias which is ludicrous because women do better than men do in school at every level, yet men do better than women on all the standardized tests.”

Edmonds agrees, too, with the many critics of standardized tests who argue that a GMAT score, like the SAT or the ACT, largely reflects socioeconomic privilege. Wealthy young professionals from wealthy backgrounds can juice their results with expensive tutors like Edmonds and pricey test prep courses. “Look,” he concedes, “if you are poor you don’t get me. We have 100 some odd tutors at Noodle who are fantastic but you don’t get people like us to help you if you don’t have the money to pay us and we make a difference. So there is a socio-economic impact as well along with all of those are problems with this test.”

‘BUSINESS SCHOOLS USE GMAT SCORES TO ADVERTISE HOW SELECTIVE THEY ARE’

Ultimately, thinks Edmonds, GMAT test results are little more than a branding device for many of the top business schools. “The bottom line is that it is all advertising for these guys,” he asserts. “They use the GMAT score to advertise how selective they are.”

When Edmonds tutors a student, he is typically a coach, a translator, and a shrink, all in one. “To be a successful tutor,” he observes, “you need to be very smart, obviously. You need to be good at taking apart the test. The people who are really good at test prep figure out how to translate our own strengths and twisted minds and reasoning process to students. To teach that to someone requires you to unpack your own internal processes and then turn all of it into a step-by-step thing that others can digest. That is part of the challenge of doing this.”

“You really need to be able to obsess about this weird, trivial test that is either the most important thing in the world or the least important thing. You also have to be good at motivating them so there is a psychological aspect to this as well. You have to be able to make them believe in themselves. But you also have to be very empathetic. I want my students to win. Nobody cares about their test scores more than I do, except maybe them or their parents. If I have ten students and one didn’t do well, it’s the one that haunts me.”

MOST GMAT ENGAGEMENTS ARE NEARLY TEN HOURS LONG AND COST $5,000

Most of his GMAT engagements come in at just under ten hours for a total cost approaching $5,000, with a few running up to 15 hours. For every hour a client works with Edmonds one-on-one, he expects the student to study between four to five hours on their own. Half of his sessions are face-to-face, the remaining sessions are typically done on Skype.

There are usually three different scenarios in which he finds himself. There’s the person who has already taken the GMAT and landed a pretty good score and wants a 20-to-30 point improvement. “They got a 710 and want to apply to several top schools and a 740 could change their outlook. That is probably at most ten hours but sometimes just two hours depending on what their exact issues are and how quickly I can identify them. I had a student who came to me with a list of the six things he has trouble with. He was right and we worked together for just two hours and his score went up 70 points. Now that is not typical and I don’t want to claim I got him 70 points form a 710 to a 780 in two hours. But that type of student who is looking for a small gain at the high end and has done a lot of work already can get it done quickly.”

Then, there is the person who, as Edmonds puts it, is “fresh off the banana truck who hasn’t done anything yet. Maybe they’ve taken a practice test, maybe not, but they haven’t really done much. Those engagements tend to run between 15 and 20 hours. And it depends on where they’re at, and where they are going to be. My third scenario is someone who has been damaged by a tutor or a test prep company. Those people can take a long time to fix, more than 20 hours. These are rare. I had one last year who was just actively taught a lot of wrong stuff and she half way through got a job offer that made her decide not to go back to school so we didn’t get through the process. But we were 15 hours in and there were another 15 hours to do.”

PREFERS THE GMAT OVER THE GRE BECAUSE HE SAYS, ‘THE GRE IS BORING’

The best client results occur when a student is fully committed to putting in the work, yet that can be difficult for many of his students in highly demanding jobs. “Sometimes they work for an investment bank and they are working 12 hours a day, six days a week and sometimes they are called in on Sunday,” he says. “They want to put in the time but can’t. The other students who don’t get great results are the ones who get in their own way psychologically.

“I had a student a few months ago who became so obsessed with the test that he couldn’t see his way through it,” adds Edmonds. “He set up roadblocks where he studied and studied and it became this massive weight on him. He put so much meaning into it and so much pressure on himself that he wasn’t capable of performing on the day of the test. Most of us are pretty good at dealing with commonplace anxiety but we are not psychologists so there are some people who have some really significant issues.“

Does Edmonds prefer the GMAT or the GRE? He advises applicants who are strong on vocabulary but may struggle with math to take the GRE. But he has a clear preference as a testing geek. “Oh, it’s the GMAT,” he shouts. “The GRE is boring. There is nothing interesting about that test. I have never seen a GRE question that I found even remotely interesting or intellectually stimulating. That is probably a small exaggeration but really it’s vocabulary with ridiculous words. I mean I love ridiculous words, by the way, but I don’t see the point of having them on a test. And then the math is easy on the GRE. It’s just simple.”

‘I’M YOUR GUY IF YOU WANT TO GET A 750 OR HIGHER’

While proud of being banned from taking the GMAT, Edmonds believes that getting an 800 doesn’t qualify a person to be a world-class tutor. “Somebody who is good at this should be able to score pretty well on the test, but I know some pretty good tutors who can’t get 800s,” he says. “I’m your guy if you want to get a 750 or higher but if there’s somebody in the 500s who wants to get into the 600s, I’m not the person for it. Look, I’ll do fine with them but there are better people than me for those folks. If you are a 500 shooting for a 600 you probably want someone who has had some of the same struggles you’ve had.”

After tutoring thousands of students over a quarter of a century, Edmonds shows no lack of enthusiasm for what he does. To him, he is simply following his guiding principle to do work that he loves doing. Given all the years he has put into the business, it may be surprising that he hasn’t yet seen the son or daughter of someone he had tutored years before. “When I do,” he laughs, “you may not ever see me again. That may be the day I decide that either life or tutoring isn’t worth it anymore.”

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