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Free test prep the product of grad student's enterprise

By David J. Craig

For students readying to take the GRE, spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on test prep services is increasingly considered a matter of course.

Lesleigh Cushing, a doctoral student in the religion department at CAS, is a co-owner of Number2.com, a company that provides free online test preparation services. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

But an Internet company co-owned by Lesleigh Cushing, a BU doctoral student in religion, wants to raise students' exam scores without testing their bank accounts. Number2.com offers free prep for the SAT, the ACT, and the GRE, including a vocabulary builder and individualized tutorials that adapt to students' abilities. More than 72,000 people have enrolled on Number2.com's Web site, which features over 1,000 multiple choice questions, since it was launched in its current form last September.

Cushing (GRS'02), who writes all the questions on the Web site, says the company's mission is to help ensure equal educational opportunity for students who cannot afford expensive preparation courses.

"The huge test prep industry creates a strong feeling in students that they can't succeed if they don't take the brand-name courses, but those courses don't offer a secret magic formula," she says. "They are effective on some level, of course, partly because they give you an occasion to study, which you might not make time to do otherwise, and because having someone watch over you is a good motivator. But doing well on a standardized test is largely a matter of simply becoming familiar and comfortable with the test you're taking."

Enrolling in a prep course on Number2.com is as easy as logging on to the Web site and entering your e-mail address, which is used to track participants' progress in the courses they select. Those who enroll can answer as many questions during a session as they like, and each time they visit, the difficulty of the questions is based on their previous performances.

"The tutorials are completely individualized because each question is rated as to difficulty, and based on how well a student performs, the computer knows what types of questions to give him or her during the next session," says Cushing, who is constantly writing new questions and monitoring response rates to make sure the questions are clear. The tutorials also provides feedback on each question, explaining how to arrive at the correct answer.

In addition, parents and teachers can monitor a child's performance, or even that of an entire class, by signing up on Number2.com as a mentor. More than 4,200 people, from as far away as Korea and India, so far have signed up as mentors, some coaching as many as 60 students.

Cushing says that the ideal time to begin using Number2.com is about three to six months before taking a standardized test, and that in order to replicate the way such tests are administered, it is best to set aside a few large blocks of time to complete the tutorials. "The one feature on the site that people might want to begin using much earlier is the vocabulary builder," she says. "It's never too early to start learning new words and incorporating them into your vocabulary. And if English isn't a person's first language, he or she should begin preparing more than six months before the test."

Cushing, whose doctoral dissertation is about the way biblical stories have been rewritten in literature, began organizing free test prep courses for high school students at the Somerville YMCA in 1995. She and four Harvard graduate students taught the courses as volunteers until last year. Eric Loken, one of those graduate students, went on to become a psychology professor at Penn State University, where he met Vincent Crespi, a physics professor who had launched Number2.com with his own money in 1996. That site, a more rudimentary version of today's offering, was expanded when Cushing, Loken, Filip Radlinski, a Web programmer and designer, and Josh Millet, another of the Harvard graduate students, joined the company as co-owners in 2000. Millet now works full-time as Number2.com's chief financial officer.

Number2.com currently is supported by the advertisements of five colleges and universities and a nonprofit student loan company. Number2.com expects soon to form cobranding partnerships with at least two other schools, which will pay to use the content from Number2.com to offer free test prep services on their own Web sites. The company also plans an outreach effort to specific public schools in low-income areas in hopes that they will use Number2.com's services.

"I began teaching test prep courses after reading that there was a direct correlation between housing prices and average SAT scores in towns in the region, and I saw tutoring kids in Somerville as a way to do something to help my community," says Cushing. "But then Eric and I thought, why can't we do this on a big scale? We wanted to open up the possibility for people to succeed at standardized tests, even if they can't afford to prepare the way everyone else around them does."

For more information, visit www.Number2.com.

28 September 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations