New York Test Prep Boutique Is Hiring–If You Can Meet Its Requirements

About one in every fifty applicants makes the cut.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, May 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Eric Gutman did not plan to become a test prep instructor. He's a physicist by training, and some years ago, was working as a quantitative analyst at a trading firm. In Chicago, the stock market closes at 3:00 p.m., so with his evenings free, Gutman started teaching for Kaplan Test Prep, the world's largest test preparation company.

It was a decision that would change everything, but the beginning didn't go so smoothly.

Kaplan used a metric called “Teacher Excellence,” or “TE” for short, which means the percentage of students who rate an instructor as "excellent" on a scale of excellent-good-fair-poor. Kaplan didn't want good or fair; the only measure that mattered was “excellent,” and at that level, Gutman was technically falling short.

"My first class had only eight students," Gutman recalls, now as founder and CEO of The Best Test Prep. "After every class, students are given surveys, and since four of eight ranked me as excellent, my TE stood at 50%, compared to a company average of 75%. I tried to explain to my manager that the sample size was too small to be representative, but regardless, I got sent to remedial instructor training,” Gutman continues with a chuckle.


From Remedial to the Academy

Gutman decided to embrace and enjoy the additional training, after which things changed quickly.

Almost immediately, his Teacher Excellence shot up to among the highest of all instructors in Chicago. Not long after, Gutman moved back to New York, the nation's largest market for test preparation, where the competition for admission to elite high schools, colleges, and graduate schools is widespread and fierce. His upward trajectory continued, and eventually Gutman had the highest teacher Teacher Excellence rating of any Kaplan GRE / SAT instructor in the entire New York - Washington, D.C. region.

“When my TE went over 90%, I was inducted into the Kaplan Academy,” Gutman recalls. “Essentially, it's the top few percent of the company's 5,000 to 6,000 instructors worldwide. Having a TE in that range is a lot harder than it sounds, because if one person ranks you as a ‘good’ instructor, you need at least nine others to rank you as ‘excellent’ to balance it out. Once you achieve it, though, you become well-known, get a video call with the Vice President of Academic Affairs, and start receiving some of the largest classes in the country to teach.”


Doing and Teaching Are Not the Same

Through the journey, Gutman always kept in mind that being good at a test does not necessarily qualify someone to teach it.

Performing well requires intuition, pattern recognition, and speed. Teaching requires the opposite: breaking down automatic processes into deliberate, step-by-step methods that another person can learn and replicate. “Untrained tutors often fall back on explaining amorphously what they did to solve a problem instead of teaching what the student should be doing systematically,” Gutman says, shaking his head. “The result is predictable: students who don't reach their full potential, and eventually end up on our doorstep.”


No Amateurs. No Exceptions.

After several students who had wasted time and resources on subpar instruction came to him for help, achieved the scores they needed, and moved on, Gutman envisioned a test preparation firm with only star instructors on its faculty to eliminate the lottery that clients of large companies are subjected to. The Best Test Prep's niche is that it employs only professional, full-time instructors who have been trained by test preparation companies, have years of experience, and also can provide proof of stellar feedback from students. “It's true,” Gutman declares. “Unlike the massive companies that have huge staffing needs, we can afford to not hire rookies, recent graduates, part-timers, no side-giggers, or ‘passion-project’ tutors. In fact, just experience and a full-time commitment aren't enough; we need to see, in black-and-white, that an instructor has delighted students for years.”

The company hires extremely selectively —of every 50 applicants, about one makes the cut. “Here's why,” Gutman explains. “The average TE at Kaplan was 75%, which means that three-quarters of students ranked their instructor as excellent. It's impressive, and most teachers at traditional schools would never clear the bar, but the difference between a TE of 85% and one of 95% is like night and day. We actually had that situation when I was teaching a class near NYU, and students from the other section were transferring into mine. It's about client satisfaction, for which high standards are necessary to deliver.”


About The Best Test Prep

Founded by Eric Gutman, formerly the highest student-ranked instructor at the world's largest test preparation company in the nation's largest market, The Best Test Prep is a boutique based in New York City. Since 2014, the company has prepared students for the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, ISEE, SSAT, and SHSAT using methods refined through years of working with thousands of students and designed to be practical and effective on Test Day. The firm employs only experienced, full-time instructors with proof of prior client satisfaction and focuses on top-choice admissions with scholarships.

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