Sandeep Gupta - Top One percent guy

bb, you essentially killed it. I have been following this discussion for a while because the posts made in support of top 1% appeared very fishy. I worked with one of the consultants there (I don't want to take the name though). The consultant claimed that he is from a top UK business school. In fact, I checked with that school and the school got back to me saying that they don't have any alum with that name ( but they also told me that the students' regular names vary at times from the school registered names). Couldn't find his LinkedIn profile. Nothing shows up on google when I search his name and the school name. I find it extremely weird and I am not so sure how to go about this.
Any suggestions? I don't want to give his name out because I still would like to give him the benefit of doubt until I can confirm this from genuine sources.

First of all, I want to preface my response with a statement that I really don’t know anything about this company. As to your question, I don’t know. The person could be giving you their partial name or second name to avoid connecting with their real profile because they know people will search on LinkedIn and they want to keep their day job in their consulting jobs separate. I know some occasional admissions consultants don’t want to give out their last names for that reason.

However, I don’t know that you need to conduct a very extensive research. All you have to do is just ask them if they indeed have attended the business school and they can prove it and it’s up to them. I think it’s pretty clear if they don’t get back with you or refused to provide any proof... if that is important to you. I know there are some consultants out there that have been admitted to a number of business calls but have never attended. They got stuck in the admissions stage.... and I don’t think attending a business school is a requirement for somebody to be an admission consultant. It would be nice if they did but not a must. Similarly, is if someone scores 800 on the GMAT, it does not immediately make them an amazing teacher that people flock to. Almost on the opposite, getting a very high score on the GMAT and being an effective teacher usually don’t go together. 😂 that is why there are so few high-scoring tutors who combine these two qualities. Also I could potentially see someone who has improved 300 points and scored only 700 to potentially be a lot more helpful in structure than someone who improved only 150 points and scored 750

Just thought I would point out some interesting patterns I’ve been observing and discussing with people. Slightly off-topic.

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True that. I wasn't looking for consultants with b school experience but if someone claims that they have been to a school, I would like it if they actually did go to the school. Otherwise, it becomes an ethical issue on his part. Even if I assume that he didn't, I would still recommend him to others but might let them know that I find the consultant's credentials a bit sketchy

I do realize that asking him directly is an option but I have already started my process with him and I don't want to ruffle any feathers at this point in time. Probably once I am done with the process, I can ask him for proof.

What I find interesting is that it's not just him but the entire company has started to appear a bit sketchy to me now.

I know nothing at all about the company discussed in this thread, but a couple of comments:


I agree with this entirely - I don't even think attending b-school would help an admissions consultant much. But I do think honesty and integrity are requirements of admissions consultants, or at least I'd only want to work with a consultant with those qualities. So if I did discover a consultant was claiming to have credentials he or she did not actually have, I'd consider that immediately disqualifying. There are people in the field you can rely on to be reliable and truthful, and to give honest advice, so there's no reason to work with someone you discover to be dishonest. But I'd reiterate that I don't know anything about the situation discussed in this thread, so I'm only making a general comment, that does not apply to any particular person or company.


Certainly you can't use GMAT scores as a barometer of teaching ability; many people with very high scores will not be good teachers. But to say "almost the opposite" is true I find frankly bizarre. Why would people with lower GMAT scores be better teachers? There's no logical or factual justification for that, though it is a claim I've seen a few people make in the GMAT field. It's a claim no one would ever accept in any other area; no one would hire a calculus tutor who got a 76% on their final exam, for example. At a minimum, your calculus tutor needs to know how to do calculus. That's not the only thing a good tutor needs, but it's a prerequisite. And, as any real GMAT ESR or GMATPrep test will confirm (excluding some of the Exam Pack tests which don't have many hard questions), a Q47 scorer, say, is getting the majority of their Q50-Q51 level questions wrong. I don't know how someone could teach math they can't do themselves.

I don't mean to suggest that it's the overall score that's important - there's no reason to care about the Quant score of a tutor who only teaches Verbal, or even about the precise Verbal score of someone who only teaches SC, for example. But if someone is teaching SC only, at a minimum you should want that person to be very good at SC. I think everyone would agree that it would be absurd to hire someone who is bad at SC as your SC tutor. It's also true that people who make large improvements, from 400 to 700 say, will often be able to offer very good advice (about study plans or study materials, say) to a test taker starting in a similar position, and hoping to make the same improvement. But it should also be clear that the person who progressed from 400 to 700 may not have much to offer to the person hoping to get to 750. The 700-scorer didn't get a 750, so there's no reason to think they know what it takes to do that. And I don't know why one would expect the 700 level test taker to be a great teacher. In fact, in my many years studying math, in undergrad and at grad school, the best teachers were always the ones who were best at math. They were the ones who understood the concepts so well that they could explain them with perfect clarity, so that every student could understand exactly how things work and why everything is true. And math is easy when you understand it.

Hi atul what happened later ? Did you get 750+ in GMAT ?