Buffer Objects and Speed

Hey all, So I'm planning on moving into the game industry and I figured the best way to get started would be to build a game. Toward that end I am teaching myself OpenGL out of the "OpenGL Super Bible(3rd edition)" and I just got through the chapter on buffer objects. It sets up a vertex array of 30,000 random(each frame) vertices in a sphere and draws them as points. It allows you to run it using regular vertex arrays or as a buffer object and it records the frames per second so you can see how much faster using a buffer object is. But it isn't. It's about 2% slower every time. Can anyone think of a good reason why? Here's the code:

// Switch between buffer objects and plain old vertex arrays
void SetRenderingMethod(void)
{
    if (useBufferObject)
    {
        glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, bufferID);
        // No stride, no offset
        glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, 0);
        glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, 0);

        if (!mapBufferObject)
        {
            if (animating)
            {
                glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0, sizeof(GLfloat) * 
                                numSphereVertices * 3, sphereVertexArray);
            }
            else
            {
                // If not animating, this gets called once
                // to establish new static buffer object
                glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(GLfloat) * 
                             numSphereVertices * 3, sphereVertexArray, 
                             GL_STATIC_DRAW);
            }
        }
    }
    else
    {
        glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0);
        glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, sphereVertexArray);
        glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, sphereVertexArray);
    }
}

By the way, if mapBufferObject is turned on then the buffer object is, well, mapped already and we don't have to copy it over.