As a Veritas instructor, I will never say that prep courses don't help. They do! In the end, though, no prep course can substitute for innumerable hours of self study. Prep courses show you the tricks and strategies, and give you a way to be held accountable for doing homework, taking practice tests, etc. They also provide a forum in which you can ask for help, clarification, etc. However, the burden is really on the student to take what he or she learned and practice applying it to problems at home.
Imagine that you want to learn how to golf. A professional golfer can show you how to swing the golf club, and you'll probably have a general idea what you need to do. Then, however, you need to go to the driving range and hit a few buckets of balls to practice. Just watching the professional golfer swing won't really get you anywhere. It's alone, on the driving range, where the real progress is made. After you've practiced a bit, you can go back and get some additional pointers from the golf pro on how to refine your play. The GMAT is no different than this.
The best GMAT students are those who take prep classes to learn the strategies and tricks, but then go to the "driving range" of GMAT practice (the official guide?) and practice, practice, practice applying what they learned. Then, they return to their GMAT instructor for additional help on the problems that they had trouble with. I've been teaching GMAT for three years, and I've had very, very few students who came to class but didn't do homework show a big improvement.
So do prep classes help? Yes, in the sense that they point you in the right direction and show you what you need to do. It's up to the student, though, to do practice problems and, most importantly, analyze those problems in terms of the strategies learned in the GMAT course.
Jim S. | GMAT Instructor | Veritas Prep
