GMAT Test Prep Company Profile Series: Veritas Prep

~ A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE ~

We continue our ongoing series of test prep company profiles today withan in-depth look at Veritas Prep. What began as a year-long school project by two Yale School of Management (SOM) students has since grown into the second-largest GMAT preparation service in the United States.

While students at Yale SOM in 2000, Chad Troutwine and Markus Moberg began a year-long project to create a better GMAT preparation offering than then existed. Troutwine, who had worked for Kaplan and had more than a decade of test prep experience, noticed that Kaplan’s hours of instruction were shrinking while their tuition was increasing. He and Moberg spent more than a year completely deconstructing the GMAT as part of an effort to identify each question type and create a foolproof method for solving them.

The fruit of their labor, Veritas Prep, launched in 2002 after winning several business plan competitions around the globe. We recently interviewed Troutwine, Veritas Prep co-founder and CEO, about how the company has grown since then. A transcript of that conversation follows.

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

Chad Troutwine: We have a GMAT faculty that numbers 400, and we offer courses in more than 90 cities and 22 countries around the world. So the answer to who our teachers are is a little more difficult to provide with any precision. They do share some things in common. Every instructor who has ever worked for us scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT exam. And because our instructor compensation is so high – we pay $50 to $150 per hour – we are able to attract the most elite group. We hire only one out of every eight applicants.

In terms of who we hire, we are looking for prior teaching experience, enthusiasm to help others and a passion for the GMAT. Basically, those of us here at Veritas Prep are test geeks – we live and breathe the GMAT – and we look for like-minded individuals. And then we devote more than 100 hours to training our GMAT team to make sure that they are not only bright and innately talented but they are able to master and teach the Veritas teaching philosophy.

We believe that the best way to prepare for the GMAT is to fully immerse oneself in the test. The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) recently compiled information that showed a clear correlation between the amount of time students spend preparing for the test and their results. We believe our students should be prepared to spend 100 to 150 hours preparing for the test. So we want teachers who have great enthusiasm and stamina and who can help others emulate their success.

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

CT: We offer a variety of different course offerings for any kind of learning style. The GMAT is not a college entrance exam. Our average students are typically in their mid 20s and 30s, so they have full-time jobs and families. Recognizing their time and schedule constraints, we offer a variety of different methods. We have week-long intensive courses, weekend courses, a pre-recorded course that students can do at their own pace and a live online offering that is very popular and offered in a range of time zones. But our most popular offering is our seven-week, 42-hour full course.

When we launched in 2002 we were pretty clear in the way that we presented ourselves, specifically that our program was suited for individuals who were interested in achieving very high scores. That said, though we are an elite provider, we are not elitist. We are the second-largest GMAT provider in the world now, trailing only Kaplan. And tens of thousands of students go through our program.

CA: What is the average Veritas Prep class size?

CT: Our class size varies depending on the city and the time of year. We have individual caps in certain cities where we won’t do a class with more than 25 or 30 students. In New York City we can have as many as 38 students, but that’s as large a class as we would conduct. We try to recreate the interaction of an upper-level seminar class in college. We want enough students to create a dynamic exchange but not a class so large that it feels like a lecture.

As for Virtual Veritas Prep, our online offering, we use a platform that allows the student to experience the course in several different ways. It is not just a recreation of the in-class course. Each Virtual Veritas Prep class is taught by two instructors, and because it is virtual we can select from any of our instructors anywhere in the world. We do have a chat function that works very much like instant messaging, which appears on the right of the screen. And the center of the screen offers a dynamic PowerPoint-like display. But unlike PowerPoint, it is truly dynamic. The instructor can draw on that screen during the course of class, and students get to hear the audio of the instructors in real time. We also cap class size in our virtual classes, and the second instructor is always available to answer any questions via chat.

CA: Can you explain the evolution of your curriculum and offerings? How does the curriculum differ from one offering to the next?

CT: The original Veritas Prep system – the approach to tackling the questions – was wholly proprietary. Markus and I created it based on our experience as test takers. Many of the other changes have been driven by listening to our students.

For instance, originally we weren’t confident that we could deliver the same quality in an intensive or weekend format. So we experimented and tracked the results, and we found that our intensive students had the same score increases as in our traditional seven-week course. Our weekend courses were a little bit lower – about 20 points lower – and we do tell prospective clients that there is a small difference in terms of the results for the weekend course.

Other evolutionary steps included adding more and more support. We are the only GMAT company that offers email and phone support every day of the year. Finally, our lesson materials have had a subtle but important evolution over the years. We track the GMAT very closely, and although major questions haven’t changed since 2002, there have been a couple of new question types that have emerged, and we have incorporated those. We also have noticed shifts in the proportions of types of questions that are included on the exam. For example, geometry is still present but less so than in the past. And so we have tailored our curriculum to reflect those changes.

CA: Anything new on the horizon? Expansion to new markets? New tools or services for students?

CT: The first way I will answer that is by addressing the questions that we hear consistently from happy Veritas Prep students or from new clients. Daily we get asked when we are going to launch a program for other high-stakes exams – the GRE, MCAT, SAT or ACT. We don’t rule out the possibility of expanding into another exam, but our chief focus is still on making our GMAT offering even more robust. So for now we will continue to focus just on this exam.

We also plan to take advantage of new technologies to augment our services. An example of that would be the introduction of our new iPhone application, which we launched several months ago and which has been very popular. We want to use new technologies to improve our diagnostic abilities. We currently offer tools to students to help them better understand their strengths and weaknesses, but we believe that there are new technologies that will allow our diagnostic tools to be even more effective.

For now, we just want to continue to build on that heritage of offering the best GMAT prep available. Right now our diagnostic tools require the student to self diagnose, but in the future we won’t rely on the student to figure out whether he or she struggles with reading comprehension or something else. Soon, the diagnostic test will give very detailed results, making students’ self-study time far more effective and valuable.

CA: What is the cost of Veritas Prep’s services?

CT: Our course prices range from $700 for the Quant or Verbal Focus classes to $1600 for the full course. And our private tutoring is between $165 and $200 per hour. The reason we are able to keep our prices relatively low is one of our great strengths: Rather than renting full-time classroom space, we instead reserve classroom space as needed, often at top universities. Since 2002 we have held GMAT courses at Harvard, Yale, Penn, the University of Chicago… So because we don’t have the fixed costs of some of our bigger competitors, we are able to then pay our instructors more. We actually think it’s a better learning environment. You get a really inspiring learning environment rather than the windowless box you typically get from some of our competitors. Our course tuition for our full course is a little bit more than some other companies, but on a per-hour basis it’s less expensive.

[For a full list of Veritas Prep offerings and prices, click here.]

CA: How does a student determine which level of test prep is best for him or her?

CT: We pour everything we have into each course, which allows us to be fairly agnostic. We really want our prospective students to visit our website, call our offices and look at the study schedule and then choose the option that allows them to devote the most time to preparing for the GMAT. If a student wants the full course, we understand that. But we really want to make the experience uniformly excellent, so we just let the student choose what he or she believes is the best fit for his or her needs and schedule.

CA: Anything you’d like to add?

CT: We offer lots of corporate options and lots of scholarships. We really try to make our services available to anyone. It’s not about paying for points. There is this idea that if you can afford a prep class you are certainly advantaged over those who can’t. We are very sensitive to that. We hope to dramatically expand the amount of scholarships and corporate-related discounts that we will be able to offer to our students. And we want to expand our corporate discounts into the service industry as well – so that people who have committed to military or public service receive at least the same discounts as our corporate partners, if not more.

One final thing I didn’t mention that we are kind of proud of is that over the years we have become a preferred choice for several top management consulting firms, investment banks and universities. For example, we have held courses at Google and Microsoft. Knowing that they would trust us for their people might give some comfort to someone who is just beginning to research GMAT prep options.

To learn more about Veritas Prep, visit www.veritasprep.com or call (800) 925-7737.

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