GMAT Test Prep Company Profile Series: Knewton Test Prep

~ A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE ~

In our continuing series profiling GMAT test prep companies, we turn today to a relatively new player in the field, Knewton Test Prep. Knewton was founded last year by Jose Ferreira, who spent many years working for industry giant Kaplan as both an instructor and an instructor trainer.

During his tenure at Kaplan, Ferreira, a Harvard Business School graduate, came to believe that bricks-and-mortar test prep is a dying model. In contrast to most other test preparation companies, whose offerings are built around classroom courses with online options only a recent addition, Knewton is an entirely online operation.

By eliminating the overhead of rented classrooms and an army of instructors, Ferreira believes he can bring his students top test prep industry talent live over the internet, providing more hours of instruction and greater access at a lower price.

In the interview that follows, learn more about Knewton’s online-only business model as well as the adaptive learning technology upon which it is based.

Clear Admit: How many GMAT tutors do you have? Who are they? What are their qualifications? What markets do they serve?

Jose Ferreira: In addition to me, we have several other instructors who went to top-five business schools, as well as some younger instructors who have come from private tutoring. We try to hire the best of the best – including people who were the best at other test prep companies. Of course, everyone who works here also has an incredibly high GMAT score. I would say that the average is over 750, although unlike some other companies, we don’t use a minimum GMAT score requirement as a proxy for teaching quality.

In terms of who we hire, obviously we start with really impressive resumes and then we have auditions. It’s kind of a protracted interview process involving two different auditions on two different days, one around teaching and one around a subject of the applicant’s choice. And even after applicants are hired, we review their work daily. The people who are doing well obviously get more classes.

Because of our online-only model, we have fewer teachers than some of the other companies. Kaplan and Princeton Review have lots and lots of local teachers. They are pretty good test takers and pretty affable people, but they are not test experts. That’s the constant struggle of running a local bricks-and-mortar operation. We get the very best teachers we can find – the very best teaching talent and the best test expert talent – and deliver it directly to our students over the Internet.

In terms of the markets we serve, we really are available anywhere you have an Internet connection. We had one customer take our course literally from the beach in the Caymans. He would get his work done during the day and then go out to the beach with his laptop for our class, and he never missed an opportunity to rub it in. We have a large international following because we are so much easier to access.

CA: Describe the type of candidate you feel would be best served by Knewton’s approach to GMAT prep? What sets Knewton apart from other test prep companies?

JF: Certainly, there are some students who won’t like our offerings. I mean, I think somebody who literally wants a teacher standing over them – if you just cannot get comfortable with online learning and you need a physical body there pushing you along – then ours is not for you. But the GMAT itself is on a computer and you may as well practice on the computer.

As for who our services are best suited to, I say come try the free trial for a week and see if you enjoy it. Again, I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone. But I do think it is increasingly moving in the direction where it will be for everyone. I really think our approach is suited to people who want to get a good GMAT score.

We get all kinds of students, and we have adaptive learning software that we built ourselves. We don’t just provide adaptive testing – we have spent millions of dollars to build a technology we call “adaptive learning.” Our system tracks absolutely everything you do with us. You can’t sneeze without our knowing about it.

We track how long you take to answer a given question, if you fall for certain types of wrong answers and what that might mean, if you learn some concepts better in text or with a teacher explaining it. The concepts are so granular – we have characterized it down that level for more than 1,000 concepts. And every day that you come to Knewton you get a list of links that explains every concept you haven’t figured out yet. It’s just light years beyond any technology that existed in the industry. We are too young to have done score studies yet, but the scores we are getting back are really phenomenal.

CA: What is the typical class size? Do students interact with other students as part of the virtual classroom? How many instructors do you have for the live classes?

JF: The class is led by one on-camera instructor – really the top test expert that we have – and then a team of teaching assistants who are also subject-matter experts. They wrote our material so they know it really well. So the team could be three, four, or five instructors, but it is usually around three teaching assistants. The students interact with the teacher and each other by chat, so there is a pretty rich kind of discussion and a lot of joking going on by chat between students.

It’s really a very convivial atmosphere. Students ask each other about their countries and get to know each other, compare notes on the weather – they really have fun with it. As an example, one guy – when we asked what everyone was doing for the weekend – said he was going to propose to his girlfriend, so we all got to know about that before she did.

The students are constantly typing in questions and I – or whoever is teaching on camera – take a lot of those questions personally. Whatever I don’t get to or think would be better answered offline, the teaching assistants handle. In our classes, if you ask a question you get an answer in real time, no matter what. Our class size cap is 40, although we’ve never actually had a class that had more than 25 students in it to date. Forty is a technological cap, but the classes usually are smaller than that.

CA: Can you explain the evolution of your curriculum and offerings?

JF: The other test prep companies have a fundamental problem, which is that it’s extremely expensive to run a bricks and mortar test prep company. I was asked to reengineer all of Kaplan’s curricula in the 90s, and we reduced it from 40 hours to 20 hours and packed in a lot more homework. But you simply cannot cover the concepts in enough detail in that amount of time. You are rushed through stuff in those courses. They all rush because it is very expensive for them to do it using the model they use.

In our case we don’t rush. Other companies have one or two problems in class devoted to basic strategies – obviously there are additional practice questions throughout the course – but at Knewton we have entire classes devoted to single concepts. Also, the other courses don’t differentiate by question type. We offer one strategy based on whether or not there are variables in the question and answer choices, another for when there are variables in the question only and numbers in the answer, and still another for when there are numbers in both the question and answer. We have a different plug-in number strategy every time. We just go through everything in way more detail.

In addition, we feature adaptive learning technology that ensures that everything you don’t yet understand is spoon-fed to you. Literally, on your student homepage you’ll receive a list of concepts you don’t know based on your actual performance, and this list goes straight to an explanation of each concept. The idea that we can diagnose at the atomic concept level what you don’t understand and give it to you is really unique.

CA: Anything new on the horizon? Expansion to new markets?

JF: We are building SAT, GRE and MCAT courses in addition to our GMAT and LSAT offerings. We are not going to release those until we are really happy with the quality level. I expect them to be ready by late 2009 or 2010.

And then, by the end of 2010-11, we expect to open up our platform to anyone. Basically, Knewton has ambitions beyond test prep. We expect to open our platform up and make it available to anyone who wants it. So, instead of having to lug big heavy textbooks around, you will be able to read the text books online and get adaptive learning on that, too. It will be like your own personal syllabus every day. It will track whether you learn a concept better with video, with text, or with graphics and then deliver it to you automatically in that format.

Our technology will even tell us when you are getting bored so we can change things up to keep it interesting. We adapt at an incredibly granular level. If we notice that you learn math better in the morning and verbal in the afternoon, that’s how we’ll structure what we give you. Ultimately, Knewton’s goal is to produce the most powerful educational technology in the world. We think we have done that already for our own customers, and in a couple of years we will be ready to open that up to anybody.

CA: What is the cost of your services?

JF: Our list price for GMAT and LSAT is $890. The competition is around $1450. So you see that our prices are quite a bit lower and we are finding ways to lower them even more. If you go to Beat the GMAT, you will still find a better price, but we are driving toward that.

CA: Are there any drawbacks to having an online-only offering?

JF: I don’t think there are. I think the world is moving that way. The market is poised to revolutionize education just the way that it has newspapers, music, TV and movies. It’s about to happen in the education industry. In fact, it’s already beginning to happen.

Whatever drawbacks exist – whether with our online offering or others’ – they are being worked out. Knewton has found that online test prep is just as social and just as fun and in some ways more so because you can joke around in class while the teacher is teaching. In some ways, it’s more convivial. Some students are going to take a little longer to adapt to the “I don’t have a drillmaster standing over me” set up, of course. But for most, I think online is the answer.

To learn more about Knewton Test Prep or to take a free trial, click here.

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