Veritas Prep vs. ManhattanGMAT
[note: this posting has been updated in January 2008 to reflect new information]
The biggest differences between Veritas and ManhattanGMAT are the Instructor hiring and training processes.
Veritas DOES NOT conduct an in-person audition with its prospective Instructors. Every other test prep company (including Kaplan and Princeton Review) at least sees teachers in action before hiring. Veritas, perhaps because it is hiring far and wide, chooses to forego an in-person audition, instead conducting phone interviews exclusively.
The training process is even more surprising - prospective teachers are simply sent materials in the mail, and then after another brief phone conversation, they’re considered prepared and trained to go in front of students. Most Veritas Instructors have never met anyone from Veritas in-person by the time they start teaching. The first time we heard this from a former Veritas Instructor (Dawn McGee), we thought it was an anomaly. But after receiving confirmation from numerous other sources (including more than ten other former and current Veritas Instructors who all gave the same account), this actually seems to be their training process. For first-hand accounts, click here.
In our experience, it is simply impossible to determine how good a teacher is over the phone. There have been dozens of instances during which a candidate sounded great over the phone (and met every qualification), only to do a subpar job during the teaching audition. (MGMAT presently flies all candidates to New York for an audition)
It’s understandable on many levels why Veritas would choose to compromise in this way - they serve over 60 cities all over the world, and turnover must occur. If you’re hiring your 1st Instructor in Columbus or Dubai (two of their markets) or replacing a departing Instructor, it would be logistically difficult and expensive to fly someone to Ohio/Dubai to interview and train this Instructor candidate. But this is exactly when training and screening are most needed.
ManhattanGMAT’s training process represents the opposite extreme, in that Instructors are flown to New York for their audition, and about 1 in 5 are extended an offer. If they’re hired, they’re required to go through 100+ hours of training before being allowed to teach. This represents a “turn-off” to some potential Instructors who don’t want to invest that kind of time. Many applicants decide that they’d rather not go through such an up-front time commitment. But we think that this is the only way to ensure that our students receive the instructional quality that they expect and deserve.
Incidentally, Veritas’s Instructor bio page is out-of-date and/or misleading, as it lists people that haven’t taught there in over five years in some cases, and also confuses 99th percentile overall with 99th percentile on EITHER section of the test. (You can confirm that most of the listed Instructors no longer teach for Veritas through a “LinkedIn” search and some e-mails). Veritas also accepts 99th percentile scores from paper tests before the test went computer-adaptive in 1998 (e.g. a 720 was a 99th percentile in the 1980s); our standard is a 99th percentile on the real computer-adaptive test from 1998 on.
For those who missed it, here was the original post:
We often get questions about ManhattanGMAT as opposed to Veritas. So, I took a little bit of time today to define what I would consider to be the differences between the two organizations that have come out during our interactions with Instructors and students who have had direct experience with Veritas.
In any case, here’s my list of differences:
Instructors – Though both Veritas and MGMAT maintain a score standard of 99th percentile, there are a few key differences in the Company’s treatment of Instructors:
1. MGMAT pays $100 per hour to start plus bonuses, while Veritas pays a range of $50 - $100 depending upon a number of circumstances. As a result, talented GMAT instructors generally seek a job with us first, for obvious reasons.
2. MGMAT requires teaching experience, while Veritas prefers it, but does not require it. MGMAT also requires that teachers receive feedback above a certain level (average 4.5 out of 5) in order to maintain employment and receive further assignments.
3. Each MGMAT Instructor goes through a minimum of 100 hours of training before seeing a student. This includes two assessments, and guest teaching in front of real classes. Veritas’s training is much shorter and more rudimentary - there have been numerous occasions during which Veritas simply sent new instructors (as described here) the course materials the week before the instructor’s 1st course began with no guidance.
Curriculum - ManhattanGMAT has invested a tremendous amount of time and effort into developing its student resources:
1. Strategy Guides - MGMAT has developed its 8 strategy guides, which are based upon the Official Guides for GMAT Review, to the point where they are now sold in Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Our 8th guide just arrived in bookstores everywhere. Veritas has, at this point, opted not to make its curriculum available for distribution through these channels.
2. Practice Tests - MGMAT’s exams were developed by the company to maintain quality and consistency with our instructional approach. We are constantly reviewing and improving our exams; we even emulate GMAC in terms of running data on questions to verify difficulty functions ourselves. Veritas licenses all of its exams from third parties. Of “Veritas’s” practice tests, 2 are available for free from GMAC at www.mba.com, 5 are available for $45.00 at CATprep.com, 5 are available for $39.95 at 800score.com, and 3 are available as a CD-ROM accompaniment to a book called Master the GMAT that’s available for about $28. These are Veritas’s 15 (2+5+5+3) tests. There are no other “Veritas” practice tests aside from the ones available from these sources. If a student would like these practice tests, he or she can simply go directly to the developers of these tests and purchase them quite inexpensively. Of course, our students are free to do so.
3. Curriculum Development - ManhattanGMAT is continuously honing and revising, coming out with an updated curriculum every calendar year. We publish our strategy guides every year, with updates. We are not aware of the frequency with which Veritas updates its materials, though current Veritas Instructors have commented to us that they have been teaching the ’same course for years.’ Also, in December 2007, we received this account from a Veritas student in Los Angeles (coincidentally, where Veritas is based):
The Veritas website claims that course materials are updated four times a year versus Manhattan GMAT’s one time a year. This turned out to be untrue. My instructor taught from his books that were printed in 2002. About 99.9% of the materials in his book matched the materials I received. Throughout the course, the instructor also pointed out various mistakes contained in the materials. He stated on more than one occasion that he has been trying to get Veritas to fix these for years. This did not sound like Veritas’s materials were being updated four times a year.
(For more from this student, click here.)
Operations - Most fundamentally, ManhattanGMAT and Veritas have completely different organizations and ways of operating, as:
1. Offices - MGMAT maintains and operates full-time offices and centers in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. We prefer to exert control of our surroundings and the student experience when feasible, and invest in our markets. We also have projectors in every classroom, which we feel dramatically improves the classroom experience. Veritas exclusively rents conference rooms/hotel space/classrooms to keep its overhead as low as possible, and doesn’t have projectors in its rented facilities (students follow along in printed materials).
2. Scope - Because we place such a premium on Instructor development and quality control, our geographic expansion has been very deliberate (some would say slow). Our interviewing and training processes make rapid expansion difficult - it’s hard for us to find a number of Instructors that meet our standards in each new city. Veritas, on the other hand, takes pride in offering courses in 60 cities around the world, from Oslo to Columbus to Kansas City to Dubai (hence, the need for phone interviews and limited training). Veritas was founded in 2002 - reaching 60 cities in 16 countries within that time frame is either very impressive or suggests that scope may take precedence over other values (e.g. teacher quality).
3. Focus - We believe that preparing someone for the GMAT (teaching, curriculum development) and helping someone with their application (framing/branding/storytelling, staying abreast of admissions trends) are two very different enterprises that require different skill sets. As a result, we work with many of the top admissions consulting firms (MBAMission, Clear Admit, Stacy Blackman, Accepted.com) whom we think do outstanding work. We prefer to focus only on teaching people the GMAT, in order to maintain specialization and be the best at one thing.
4. Corporate Relationships - ManhattanGMAT currently serves many blue-chip investment banks and consulting firms, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, McKinsey, and Bank of America, among many others. These firms have chosen to bring ManhattanGMAT onsite to train their analysts and consultants. We are not aware of any corporate clients of Veritas.
I hope that some people find this somewhat helpful. It’s all true to the best of my knowledge, though I’d welcome any corrections.
Also, I would urge anyone who is considering a choice between ManhattanGMAT and Veritas to seek out individuals who have had direct experiences with one Company or the other, as they would be the most objective and useful sources of information. Find a friend or a friend of a friend that has utilized MGMAT or Veritas and ask them for their feedback. It’ll be worth the legwork to make a more informed decision regarding what will be a substantial commitment.