Do Prep Courses Really Help?

medea66 wrote:Hi all,

For those of you that have taken a prep course, have you seen any improvement in your score? If so, which course was it?

Hi Guys,

With some recent postings on the forum suggesting that prep courses are not helping much, this is a request to all people who have taken prep courses to share their experiences.

Are their techniques and strategies really helping? Are they worth for the money they are charging(around 1000$)?


Regards,
Devang Shah

I am currently taking Veritas, its ok. Took in the past Manhattan online I tried to follow but did not help.
The explanations and strategies are ok but still you are the one to work on your own very hard to achieve a satisfactory score. The3 hour class is going to be the same as their books.

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.

I havent yet taken my test ... so cannot say if this will help me get an my target score. But I would recommend ManhattanGMAT ... so far.
I have found the material, structure, tutors to be of a very good quality.
I suppose the true measure will be my final GMAT score !

I dont think you can expect a course to be a magic solution in getting a top score in the GMAT. You have to put in the effort and the hard work to practice the techniques and strategies learnt in class.

Hello,

I'm taking the gmaxonline course and it's helping me a lot. I only paid $399 for it and it's sure worth every penny. The teachers explain the material really well and they cover the content down to the smallest detail. I take the test in september--will post success or failure then.

Drew

it depends where your scoring around and if you are good at disciplining yourself. what are you scoring on your practice test? if you are scoring around 500 its best just to self study b/c prep courses cater to a large # of people and most of them just want 500...sadly, but true! i took the princeton review course and took 6 of their cats and only scored 530 on the real gmat. so if you need to reach 500 take a prep course!

A prep course can teach you strategies on how to more effectively approach the GMAT, but it is still up to you to study, do practice problems, and take practice CATs. Even the best prep course can't help you if you don't study diligently.

I just recently took the MGMAT online class and definitely think it helped. The class was very informative but you could probably get the same type of help out of buying the books and doing self study.

I was very discouraged after scoring a low a 470 (Q35, V20) back in February, so I signed up for MGMAT and took the test again this past Saturday and scored a 600 (Q48, V26). This is all I need to apply to the school that I want to attend even though I know I could have done better since I was scoring in the low 30s in verbal before the actual test.

The class definitely helped me to be more confident and know the material better. I will say, if you don't have the time to put into the course (15-20 hours a week) then it is not worth the time.