"Ultimate" Princeton Review Forum

[sfamor]

Has any taken the "Ultimate" Princeton Review Course? I was previously considering Blueprint or Testmasters, but I am intrigued by the number of hours of instruction (104, NOT including practice test taking time) as well as the current promotion they are running ($500 off for a total of $1,199). I have yet to take a practice test, but I am not at all a natural test taker. I previously took the GRE's without using a prep class and got a very average score as I did before that on my SAT's so I can only imagine that my score on my first practice test will be pretty low. I'm a full-time working professional and I want to take a course in order to give myself a built-in structure for studying for the test. It seems that everyone on here is rather down on the Princeton Review courses, but I'd love to hear from people who actually took it, especially the "ultimate" class. I'll be taking it in Berkeley if that makes any difference.

[EarlCat]

Has any taken the "Ultimate" Princeton Review Course? I was previously considering Blueprint or Testmasters, but I am intrigued by the number of hours of instruction (104, NOT including practice test taking time) as well as the current promotion they are running ($500 off for a total of $1,199). I have yet to take a practice test, but I am not at all a natural test taker. I previously took the GRE's without using a prep class and got a very average score as I did before that on my SAT's so I can only imagine that my score on my first practice test will be pretty low. I'm a full-time working professional and I want to take a course in order to give myself a built-in structure for studying for the test. It seems that everyone on here is rather down on the Princeton Review courses, but I'd love to hear from people who actually took it, especially the "ultimate" class. I'll be taking it in Berkeley if that makes any difference.

I used to teach for them. At the time they didn't have "ultimate" LSAT, but they did an Ultimate MCAT in Austin, which was like summer camp for really high-strung people.

I'm guessing this is just Hyperlearning with more lessons. If it is, it'll be a solid program. (The legit criticism of TPR is directed at their retail books, not their courses.) That being said, what makes or breaks a course is its instructor, so see if you can do a little homework on who's teaching it and their background. Are they a n00b straight out of training, or do they have a couple years of teaching/tutoring LSAT under their belt?

Anyway, assuming the instructors are solid, that's a really good price for that much prep.

[tomwatts]

I'm teaching one of these right now (in Berkeley), so I can tell you a little bit about how it's supposed to work (at least in theory). It's pretty new, so you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually took it as yet.

In Berkeley, the class is the regular Hyperlearning class with 5 coaching sessions (of 4 hours apiece) added. The coaching sessions put all the individual meetings, test review, etc., into discrete chunks so that the teacher doesn't have to figure out some way to squeeze it into class time. It makes the course run smoother, generally, and it means that you can get really specific, direct feedback from your instructor from the very beginning, which is nice. So the format is, I think, a particularly good one. (I think the Hyperlearning course was a really good course to begin with, and this smooths out one of the minor bumps.)

The make-or-break of any course is the instructor, though. The good thing about Ultimate LSAT is that we're putting more emphasis on the instructor than we usually do. We're trying to staff them farther in advance and market the specific instructor (as in, you're not so much taking the "Princeton" Review as the "Tom" Review if you take an Ultimate LSAT with me) as the main point of interest. This is good, because it means that if you want to know who the instructor is (and possibly even meet him/her at some sort of promotional event), you can, and you can get a lot of information.

If you do look into this and want a candid opinion from an insider, PM me with which course you're interested in and what you find out about the instructor, and I can probably tell you plenty (since I know our staff well). I can't imagine that we'd put an instructor on Ultimate LSAT who I wouldn't strongly endorse (we're being pretty damned careful about these), but I can let you know either way.

[SanDiegoJake]

I'm also teaching one of these courses right now (San Diego), and I would also be happy to field any inquiries on it.