Every year a considerable number of high school graduates in Russia choose to pursue a career in medicine and apply to medical universities. However, the level of preliminary training of applicants is often insufficient to enrol in the preferred study programme. Private tutoring is often considered as a means to close the gap between the generally insufficient level of mainstream education and high entry requirements of medical universities. The study is based on the hypothesis that the tutor is an important, but not essential component of an individual educational strategy for entering a medical university. So, this paper aims to provide an analysis of the efficiency of private supplementary tuition by measuring its impact on the performance of students in the Unified State Exam (USE) in biology. Besides, the role of two educational programmes run by the Moscow government, namely, 'Medical class in Moscow school' and 'Sechenov Pre-University' is analyzed. More than 100 first-year students of Sechenov University took part in the questionnaire survey to implement the goals and objectives of the research. The survey results were analysed using Orange 3 statistical package. Standard methods of descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and clustering were used.