China's Test-Prep Juggernaut: How $6,100 Buys a Better SAT Score

In May 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Daniel Golden went inside New Oriental Education & Technology Group — the Beijing test-prep company founded in 1993 that had become the engine room of Chinese ambitions for American college admissions — and found a machine for manufacturing high SAT scores.

The product was a two-month, six-days-a-week intensive course costing about $6,100. What it sold was not understanding but tactics: how to take the test. And by the numbers, it worked. New Oriental's 1,200 applicants to the University of Virginia that year averaged 610 of 800 on the SAT reading section and 670 in writing, against 641 and 650 for American applicants — and a remarkable 783 in math, against 669 for Americans. More than 200,000 students in China had gone through the regimen in the year ended that February.

So do the scores mean anything?

That was Golden's real question, and the industry's answer was uncomfortable. The Princeton Review and Kaplan, America's two biggest test-prep companies, acknowledged New Oriental's results — then argued the course set students up to fail once they actually arrived on American campuses. A student trained to game a test, they said, is not necessarily a student trained to think.

The deeper story was about demand, not supply. For prosperous Chinese families, an American degree was status and a job ticket rolled into one — and since Chinese undergraduates typically paid full international tuition, American institutions from obscure colleges to prominent universities competed for them. New Oriental was simply the toll booth on that road.

The irony nobody missed

The United States invented the modern standardized test as a measure of merit. Fifteen years of Chinese test-prep industrialization turned it into a measure of preparation — and forced an awkward question back on the testers: when a score can be bought for $6,100, what exactly is it measuring?