{"id":302,"date":"2009-08-20T19:26:41","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T00:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.manhattangmat.com\/blog\/?p=302"},"modified":"2019-09-05T16:26:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T16:26:06","slug":"mgmat-and-score-guarantees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/blog\/mgmat-and-score-guarantees\/","title":{"rendered":"Manhattan Prep and Score Guarantees"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ManhattanDid you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We\u2019re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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We occasionally get questions about why we don\u2019t offer a score improvement guarantee.<\/p>\n

There are a few little reasons, and one big reason. In our experience, a test prep score guarantee has a number of attendant issues:<\/span><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 What\u2019s the baseline?\u00a0<\/strong>The majority of students who start a prep course have yet to take the real GMAT. Thus, the baseline that is generally used is a practice test, often before a student has become familiar with the GMAT\u2019s format (e.g. Data Sufficiency questions) and timing (e.g. solving a problem every 2 minutes). Here at Manhattan Prep, we take initial practice test scores with a HUGE grain of salt, and would feel strange about measuring improvement off of a deeply flawed initial measure that we advise students to ignore much of the time.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Not all improvements are created equal.\u00a0<\/strong>Manhattan Prep\u00a0caters to many very ambitious students who are seeking top-notch scores. In our experience, it\u2019s a whole lot easier to take someone from a 520 to a 600 than a 710 to a 760. A score improvement metric or guarantee is useful only in context.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 The fine print.\u00a0<\/strong>We get many students who have taken a prep course with another company and failed to get the score that they want who then come to us. We\u2019re naturally very curious about their experience with the other company, and we\u2019ve found that virtually none of these students received their money back from the initial test prep company. When we ask them why not, they say, Oh, the policy was that I had to do \u201cx\u201d practice tests\/homework problems\/proctored exams, and they said that I didn\u2019t do that so I didn\u2019t qualify. Other times, the guarantee is to re-take the same course that was unhelpful the first time, an option that isn\u2019t too appealing to most people.<\/p>\n

Beyond the above, fundamentally, we think that it\u2019s incongruous for an educational institution (It might seem grandiose for us to use that term, but it\u2019s truly how we think of ourselves!) to guarantee its students any kind of outcome. We guarantee that we do our utmost to recruit and hire the best\u00a0Instructors<\/a>\u00a0anywhere, give them the best\u00a0training<\/a>\u00a0we can, pay them the most ($100\/hr. off the bat), and equip them with the best\u00a0materials<\/a>. But we honestly think a GMAT course is like most things in life: \u201cyou\u2019ll get out what you put in,\u201d and to represent otherwise\u00a0seems disingenuous.<\/p>\n

The substance of a guarantee though, is something we completely agree with. If a student of ours doesn\u2019t achieve his or her score goals, we want to know about it, and we\u2019ll work with him or her to see how best to move forward. Any course student of ours in this situation is entitled to meet with a senior\u00a0Instructor\u00a0to diagnose what happened on test day and plot next steps.\u00a0 We have a strong track record of not letting students walk away unhappy or dissatisfied \u201cit\u2019s one of the keys to the Company\u2019s growth and\u00a0success.<\/p>\n

For another perspective, Manhattan Prep\u00a0currently serves Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bank of America, Google, Deloitte, and many other companies as corporate clients. None of these companies has ever asked Manhattan Prep to guarantee their employees\u2019 performance. They would probably mistrust us if we did! They would rather depend on the feedback and results they receive from their own employees.<\/p>\n

We hope that the above helps give you a sense on why Manhattan Prep doesn\u2019t offer a guarantee. To us, it\u2019s much less about the policy and more about the Company behind it. Test prep consumers are at something of a disadvantage because there\u2019s so much misinformation out there, and a guarantee can seem like a proxy for quality. Our advice is to gain confidence in your own judgment of different test prep offerings by consulting with friends or contacts to see what worked for them.\u00a0 Seek out people whose opinions you trust who have been through the process. That\u2019s better than any language on a website.\u00a0?<\/p>\n

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Take a complete course<\/a> with one of\u00a0our master instructors. You can try out any first session for free! No strings attached. We promise.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We\u2019re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here. We occasionally get questions about why we don\u2019t offer a score improvement guarantee. There are a few little reasons, and one big reason. In our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[874,52863,9],"tags":[53373,52862],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gmat-resources","category-manhattan-prep-gmat-news","category-taking-the-gmat","tag-gmat-score-guarantees","tag-score-guarantees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15689,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/15689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gmat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}