The Test Prince of Bel-Air

Robin Singh has had a brutal week: His students have just received their scores from the recent Law School Admission Test (LSAT), and Singh has been providing emotional first aid, restoring bruised egos and fractured dreams of legal preeminence. But on this Saturday night, at the W Hotel in L.A., he's lounging--bottle-service style--with his TestMasters employees. In his torn jeans and loose suede shirt, surrounded by a dozen twentysomethings in floral button-downs and supersized belt buckles, the 38-year-old Singh doesn't come off as a standardized-test coach who has made millions teaching four-variable logic problems. He looks like a headliner at the Viper Room--and seems pretty happy with his own performance. 

Singh takes a slug of Johnnie Walker Blue Label and, in a conspiratorial aside says, "Kaplan's up to something." Kaplan is the industry monster, a national test-prep juggernaut known to every high-school senior (SAT), would-be grad student (GRE), and aspiring lawyer (LSAT) in the country. Kaplan also happens to be a Singh rival--and his former employer. So when Singh says Kaplan is up to something, it probably means Singh's up to something, too.

Test prep has become a bloody trade--a $950 million business--and no slice of it is more competitive than the $240 million graduate-test market, where companies intimidate, threaten, and sue one another with adolescent glee. But Singh must be doing something right. TestMasters, which began as a one-man tutoring shop in his Los Angeles apartment in 1991, has exploded into a $10 million machine with roughly a third of the $30 million national LSAT-prep industry; on his adopted turf of California (he's from Tallahassee, Florida), his company boasts an astonishing 60% share. "Kaplan may be the first to put out a new product," says Singh, never one to soft-sell his own gifts. "But it's not going to be the best."

Kaplan, part of the Washington Post Co., is the biggest for-profit education business in the country, with more than a quarter of its $1.1 billion in revenue coming from test prep (the company doesn't break out revenues for specific courses). But it's still wary of its slacker nemesis. "TestMasters is an example of what we've always seen: someone who starts out as one of our teachers and then figures they can do it on their own," says Ben Baron, vice president of graduate programs at Kaplan. "For most, that proves to be a lot harder than they think it will be. But Robin seems to have done a pretty good job of building a business." In this tight-lipped world, Baron's comments qualify as gushing.

Now Singh is looking to do to Kaplan nationally what he did in California. Already he has 20% of the LSAT market in DC and a 13% slice in New York; he also expanded his curriculum to include the SAT, GRE, and other standardized tests. And don't let the L.A. vibe fool you: Singh's a territorial beast who will come after anyone within poaching range of his intellectual property. He has been locked in battle for more than six years with a Houston company called Test Masters over ownership of the domain name (and was nearly thrown in jail after a confrontation on the courthouse steps). And he once dispatched a mole to infiltrate a competitor, a former partner who, he suspected, was using TestMasters materials.

Singh enjoys being deposed because he gets to let his logic skills run off leash.

Singh says he actually enjoys being deposed because he gets to let his logic skills run off leash. Still, taking down behemoths such as Kaplan and the Princeton Review is likely to prove trickier than your average syllogism. "Everyone knows that Robin is an excellent teacher who we need to keep our eye on," says Steve Quattrociocchi, executive vice president and general manager of test prep for the Princeton Review, which offered to buy TestMasters in 1998. "But companies like his usually get hung up when they try to expand beyond the guru."

More than 100,000 people each year take the LSAT, a six-part daylong affair designed to suck every last bit of their mental juice. The result is likely to be the single most important number of one's career--the difference between a partnership at Akin Gump and one at Dewey Cheatem and Howe. "Those few extra questions you get right or wrong could end up determining everything about your life," Singh says.

Before Singh became a guru--a label he rejects even as he plasters his name on virtually every piece of TestMasters material--he was just another rudderless student at Duke. But after getting a perfect score on the LSAT (the first of 12--more than anyone in history), he enrolled in the University of Southern California's law program in 1989. Three months later, he dropped out. "I was just tired of doing things that other people told me to do," says Singh. "I just thought it was all bogus." To pay the bills, he became an LSAT instructor for Kaplan.