Enhance.cn Hopes to Enhance Chinese Students’ Standardized Test Scores with Slick Web Service

As a former teacher, I tend to think standardized tests are basically the devil, and I abhor the idea of “teaching to the test.” But as useless as these tests may be, for now, everyone still has to take them, so teaching to them does make some practical sense. A Chinese startup called Enhance.cn wants to help Chinese students with that by offering online test prep services.

Eventually, Enhance.cn says it will offer services for a bunch of tests, including the GMAT, GRE, SAT, and TOEFL, but so far its GMAT service is the only one online. According to its site, the company is staffed by “top-notch talent” from companies like Tencent, Baidu, Renren, and Microsoft, but it is also hiring web developers, presumably to work on its GRE, SAT, and TOEFL products.

I took a look around the company’s GMAT site and was quite impressed. Questions are organized by category, with English and Chinese headings, and also rated by users based on how essential they feel it is for other users to complete them (basically, harder questions are rated higher). After you’ve answered a question you get a great breakdown (as seen below) that includes the correct answer, an official explanation, comments from other users on the question and answer, and even a graph to show what other users answered. The whole experience is smooth and very easy to navigate around; it makes it easy to believe this site really was designed by skilled pros.

The site also offers 30 full practice tests rated for difficulty, a free exercises feature that lets you work on a collection of questions based on your customized preferences and parameters, and pre-made “workbooks” with preselected questions. You can answer questions without logging in, but if you do set up an account, the site also tracks your performance. All in all, it seems like it would be a great resource for preparing for the GMAT.

I’m not entirely sure where all these questions come from; the site explicitly states that it hasn’t been reviewed or endorsed by the GMAT and many of the questions I found were also available elsewhere on the internet. I’m also not clear on how the company plans to make money in the long run; for now it is running a few ads but using the site was totally free. But for Chinese users hoping to attend American schools, Enhance.cn’s GMAT service (and its other test services when they’re released) should be an invaluable resource. There’s plenty of test prep stuff out there already, of course, but this site is very well designed.