Chads videos enough for organic on MCAT?

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bambam92

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Hey guys, I am into my prep, and had a question. I purchased chad's MCAT prep videos--and they have been very helpful. I use them along with TPR and TBR books. I have already taken organic I and have strong foundation in it, but haven't taken organic II yet. I am wondering if chads videos will be enough for the organic on MCAT? People claim he covers all of aamc topics in his videos, but not sure. Has anyone done this? This is only pre-req I haven't taken, and this summer is the only time I really have to devote undivided prep to the test--so I am going forth with sn2ed. Anyways, anyone just essentially use chads for organic prep?!? Thanks guys.:thumbup:

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In my opinion it should be enough, especially if you have a strong base in Organic I. Organic II is heavy Organic I concepts with about 5 categories of reactions, and for the most part, all of the reactions in each category follow the same pattern (depending on if it's happening in acidic or basic conditions)
 
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Hey guys, I am into my prep, and had a question. I purchased chad's MCAT prep videos--and they have been very helpful. I use them along with TPR and TBR books. I have already taken organic I and have strong foundation in it, but haven't taken organic II yet. I am wondering if chads videos will be enough for the organic on MCAT? People claim he covers all of aamc topics in his videos, but not sure. Has anyone done this? This is only pre-req I haven't taken, and this summer is the only time I really have to devote undivided prep to the test--so I am going forth with sn2ed. Anyways, anyone just essentially use chads for organic prep?!? Thanks guys.:thumbup:

Definitely enough
 
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I used Chad since I had organic 4 years ago now, and supplemented with practice problems from several sources. My MCAT retake was yesterday so I'll let you know how I did in a month. Haha.
 
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I used Chad since I had organic 4 years ago now, and supplemented with practice problems from several sources. My MCAT retake was yesterday so I'll let you know how I did in a month. Haha.
Good luck to you:) And yes keep me posted, if you don't mind--how much organic did your BS section have?
 
I use to be an avid supporter of coursesaver until recently. I've seen them progress from the small community in 2010 to what it's become today. But in the past two years, I've been so disgusted with their business ethics. I mean, it's totally understandable to inflate the membership costs to help pay for servers ...and to profit. But a 500% increase... come on now. They use the excuse, "well prep courses cost thousands, it's worth the investment." ...which is just bogus considering there's so much free content out there. And that's what really gets me... is how greedy they've become. And to be honest, I don't even think it's Chad. He's genuinely a nice person and I think if it were up to him, it'd be free still.

My issue is more so with his business partner and web developer, Alan. He's really overdone it with the restrictions on the site: first, you have to force yourself to log off if you logged in a different PC (even if it's the same IP address). If you dared to even open a video in a different browser, it kicks you off the site entirely. The website has become laggy as hell because there's so many people at any given time and he refuses to invest in new servers. Half the time servers are down. For a long time, I thought it was my internet connection acting up. I mean, atleast let people pre-load videos (like on Youtube). Instead, he insists on using some medieval media player. It's all in the name of greed. He's done everything possible to ensure that absolutely no one shares accounts (not even the same household). Personally, I wouldn't mind if people decided to share an account. Times are rough. I mean, just learn to appreciate that people are supporting the website. Many online media sources often allow 2-3 accounts to access a webpage before imposing a block. Oh and guess what?!! If you refer someone to their website, you get 1 whole week free!! (just bare in mind, membership for your friend is give or take, $50-$180). Ridiculous. For these reasons and more, I stopped encouraging people to use Chad's videos and instead redirect them to free online content that's widely available on the internet.

And I know Alan lurks this forum so... Hi Alan. o/
 
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I use to be an avid supporter of coursesaver until recently. I've seen them progress from the small community in 2010 to what it's become today. But in the past two years, I've been so disgusted with their business ethics. I mean, it's totally understandable to inflate the membership costs to help pay for servers ...and to profit. But a 500% increase... come on now. They use the excuse, "well prep courses cost thousands, it's worth the investment." ...which is just bogus considering there's so much free content out there. And that's what really gets me... is how greedy they've become. And to be honest, I don't even think it's Chad. He's genuinely a nice person and I think if it were up to him, it'd be free still.

My issue is more so with his business partner and web developer, Alan. He's really overdone it with the restrictions on the site: first, you have to force yourself to log off if you logged in a different PC (even if it's the same IP address). If you dared to even open a video in a different browser, it kicks you off the site entirely. The website has become laggy as hell because there's so many people at any given time and he refuses to invest in new servers. Half the time servers are down. For a long time, I thought it was my internet connection acting up. I mean, atleast let people pre-load videos (like on Youtube). Instead, he insists on using some medieval media player. It's all in the name of greed. He's done everything possible to ensure that absolutely no one shares accounts (not even the same household). Personally, I wouldn't mind if people decided to share an account. Times are rough. I mean, just learn to appreciate that people are supporting the website. Many online media sources often allow 2-3 accounts to access a webpage before imposing a block. Oh and guess what?!! If you refer someone to their website, you get 1 whole week free!! (just bare in mind, membership for your friend is give or take, $50-$180). Ridiculous. For these reasons and more, I stopped encouraging people to use Chad's videos and instead redirect them to free online content that's widely available on the internet.

And I know Alan lurks this forum so... Hi Alan. o/
If what you're saying is true, Chad is still awesome. Alan maybe not so much. That being said, I am multiple years out of my prereqs and am so grateful coursesaver exists. It really it's like taking a prep course in your living room.
 
If what you're saying is true, Chad is still awesome. Alan maybe not so much. That being said, I am multiple years out of my prereqs and am so grateful coursesaver exists. It really it's like taking a prep course in your living room.
If you can look past all the technicalities I mentioned, then yeah, you'll be pleased with what the site has to offer. Chad is a remarkable teacher. At the same time though, when you have a video buffering every minute or two, it really hinders your learning ability. I wouldn't bother watching videos during the day since the website was so congested at those hours. That may not be the case for everyone since apparently it varies with location (how close you are to a given server).
 
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If you can look past all the technicalities I mentioned, then yeah, you'll be pleased with what the site has to offer. Chad is a remarkable teacher. At the same time though, when you have a video buffering every minute or two, it really hinders your learning ability. I wouldn't bother watching videos during the day since the website was so congested at those hours. That may not be the case for everyone since apparently it varies with location (how close you are to a given server).
Czar, have you tried switching servers? I haven't had many problems and when I have one, a server switch is enough to help. I do have really fast internet though, so that might make a difference.
 
I use to be an avid supporter of coursesaver until recently. I've seen them progress from the small community in 2010 to what it's become today. But in the past two years, I've been so disgusted with their business ethics. I mean, it's totally understandable to inflate the membership costs to help pay for servers ...and to profit. But a 500% increase... come on now. They use the excuse, "well prep courses cost thousands, it's worth the investment." ...which is just bogus considering there's so much free content out there. And that's what really gets me... is how greedy they've become. And to be honest, I don't even think it's Chad. He's genuinely a nice person and I think if it were up to him, it'd be free still.

My issue is more so with his business partner and web developer, Alan. He's really overdone it with the restrictions on the site: first, you have to force yourself to log off if you logged in a different PC (even if it's the same IP address). If you dared to even open a video in a different browser, it kicks you off the site entirely. The website has become laggy as hell because there's so many people at any given time and he refuses to invest in new servers. Half the time servers are down. For a long time, I thought it was my internet connection acting up. I mean, atleast let people pre-load videos (like on Youtube). Instead, he insists on using some medieval media player. It's all in the name of greed. He's done everything possible to ensure that absolutely no one shares accounts (not even the same household). Personally, I wouldn't mind if people decided to share an account. Times are rough. I mean, just learn to appreciate that people are supporting the website. Many online media sources often allow 2-3 accounts to access a webpage before imposing a block. Oh and guess what?!! If you refer someone to their website, you get 1 whole week free!! (just bare in mind, membership for your friend is give or take, $50-$180). Ridiculous. For these reasons and more, I stopped encouraging people to use Chad's videos and instead redirect them to free online content that's widely available on the internet.

And I know Alan lurks this forum so... Hi Alan. o/
Let me address each of your concerns one by one. To understand our changes, you have to understand where we started. I started the site in 2006 before I met Chad and made it a place to share study notes, lab reports, photos and such with students that I went to school with.

Over time I added videos, but it all sucked pretty badly since you had to download the videos, mess with codecs, which were different depending on your OS and such. It was fine for technical people, but many others just couldn't use the site effectively.

During my first year of dental school, Chad contacted me and asked if we could improve things, he was getting married and needed to free up his evenings since he was spending 3-4 nights a week tutoring till 10PM. Being the kind hearted person he is, he wanted to make sure that students who needed help, could reliably get it, and that meant upgrading the site. At first we only had 2 video series (gen chem and o-chem) and were the same for all pre-health students. We purchased an off the shelf video program that "worked" ok. It wasn't great, but it was a serious improvement from what we had. I sold a bunch of stuff, purchased HD video cameras, wireless mics and such. We started with 0 debt and were not out to make a living out of it since I intended to be a dentist, and Chad already had his dream job of helping students in the tutoring center. All we really wanted was just to help some students get reliable access to study material.

I priced it at $20/month and we got swamped with customers. We went from 20 students in our first month to 350 in month 4, far more than our server could support and when I talked to an expert, they suggested I purchase a "load balancing appliance" which was $80,000. I about fell off my chair and realized that my initial pricing was naive and as such unsustainable and raised it to $30 which let us upgrade our servers and push back the need for the high end box. It ended up being a great thing for us as most all our problems went away with our first big server upgrade.

Around that time we realized that there was a lot more to being a video subscription service than having a single server using regular old HTTP streaming. There were a number of factors involved in that such as the ability to stream to an apple device, performance, speed, the ability to skip forward to the middle of a video without downloading the whole thing and then security.

Security became an issue when we found users trying to setup an ebay / craigslist business selling our videos on DVD or download. We had problems with pre-dental clubs purchasing a single subscription and sharing it across the entire club. That is why as Czar noted, we made some security changes such as going with a high end video streaming server with security options, and locked down the server to one computer per login at a time, with a shorter buffer to prevent piracy. Is this a financial decision, YES. I can't afford to hire programmers, pay for high end servers and everything if everyone is using the same login. That would mean over crowding our servers with students and everyone's performance suffers.

I need to mention something about server performance here. We have 7 servers, 6 that do content delivery, 1 that handles only the website. Each of our 4 US servers are supposed to handle 1000 customers simultaneously. Our busiest server in Washington DC in the past 30 days got up to 280 simultaneous connections. Those who say I put profit before performance are wrong. I have enough server capacity to handle nearly 8X the traffic we have.

That doesn't mean every experience is perfect, we are NOT Youtube with tens of thousands of servers, I have 7. we have 4 in the US, 2 overseas to help our troops that are deployed, not because we have a huge customer base we are profiting from, but to serve our customers who are serving us. Now not only do we not have that many servers, but where Youtube is paying around $0.01/GB, if I were to use the same CDN network of Akami that Netflix / Amazon uses, it would cost me $0.19/GB. That means I could easily be paying out over $25,000/month on bandwidth alone. The advantage would be minimal to our customers. Let me say that again, it would be minimal. Yes there are a few that would benefit, but we have nearly 2000 users per day, out of those about 4-5 contact us with issues, most of those are resolved once they realize they can pick a different server.

Then you have the outlier, the 0.1% where there isn't anything I can do to get them connected. They run speedtests and they are at nearly dialup speeds. Friday night I called a guy to help him with his computer, he lives in Canada, can connect to every website we tried at great speeds, but not one of his computers at the house could connect to even our homepage. He said his brother that lives 3 doors down has no problems at all. I go look at my servers, I have over 1000 total users and no weird spikes in support tickets. I can't identify any problems on my side, I spent 20 minutes helping him with his computer, but ultimately I am not responsible for his internet connection, network, or his PC. I made a few suggestions such as taking his laptop to his brothers and trying it there, then calling his ISP and I haven't heard back.

This didn't start off as some grand business plan, it started out as a way to help users. Each time we identified a gap, we worked to fill it. In some cases it was hardware, in some it was handled through programming. To manage the site it has changed from a small part time job, to one where I spend around 50+ hours a week personally, we also have 2 top level programmers, one full time, the other 20 hours a week. We have a dedicated customer service staff member and we also have Chad full time now. I will NOT apologize for needing to increase prices. Chad has re-recorded nearly every video 3 times in the past 4 years, added multiple versions specific for MCAT, DAT, and College. He has added biochemistry, Biology, Physics, Math (For DAT) and we have added nearly 10 thousand questions to the site.

You are right in your assessment that Chad is not the motivating factor behind price increases, I am. That is because it is my responsibility to make sure he gets his content delivered in the best possible way. He is beyond the most generous person I know, and best partner in the world. You are mostly right that our site would be completely free if it was up to him, but when you have the kind of expenses we have, it isn't free, but together we have tried to put together a resource that every student who was serious about school could afford.

All that being said, if you have any issues with the site, contact us through the site, most things get resolved pretty quickly. I can say that right now our mobile app is glitchy, and we are working on a new version, but everything else is working well on our end, but maybe we can help you figure out what is wrong with your end.

Dr. Alan Halls D.M.D.
 
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Let me address each of your concerns one by one. To understand our changes, you have to understand where we started. I started the site in 2006 before I met Chad and made it a place to share study notes, lab reports, photos and such with students that I went to school with.

Over time I added videos, but it all sucked pretty badly since you had to download the videos, mess with codecs, which were different depending on your OS and such. It was fine for technical people, but many others just couldn't use the site effectively.

During my first year of dental school, Chad contacted me and asked if we could improve things, he was getting married and needed to free up his evenings since he was spending 3-4 nights a week tutoring till 10PM. Being the kind hearted person he is, he wanted to make sure that students who needed help, could reliably get it, and that meant upgrading the site. At first we only had 2 video series (gen chem and o-chem) and were the same for all pre-health students. We purchased an off the shelf video program that "worked" ok. It wasn't great, but it was a serious improvement from what we had. I sold a bunch of stuff, purchased HD video cameras, wireless mics and such. We started with 0 debt and were not out to make a living out of it since I intended to be a dentist, and Chad already had his dream job of helping students in the tutoring center. All we really wanted was just to help some students get reliable access to study material.

I priced it at $20/month and we got swamped with customers. We went from 20 students in our first month to 350 in month 4, far more than our server could support and when I talked to an expert, they suggested I purchase a "load balancing appliance" which was $80,000. I about fell off my chair and realized that my initial pricing was naive and as such unsustainable and raised it to $30 which let us upgrade our servers and push back the need for the high end box. It ended up being a great thing for us as most all our problems went away with our first big server upgrade.

Around that time we realized that there was a lot more to being a video subscription service than having a single server using regular old HTTP streaming. There were a number of factors involved in that such as the ability to stream to an apple device, performance, speed, the ability to skip forward to the middle of a video without downloading the whole thing and then security.

Security became an issue when we found users trying to setup an ebay / craigslist business selling our videos on DVD or download. We had problems with pre-dental clubs purchasing a single subscription and sharing it across the entire club. That is why as Czar noted, we made some security changes such as going with a high end video streaming server with security options, and locked down the server to one computer per login at a time, with a shorter buffer to prevent piracy. Is this a financial decision, YES. I can't afford to hire programmers, pay for high end servers and everything if everyone is using the same login. That would mean over crowding our servers with students and everyone's performance suffers.

I need to mention something about server performance here. We have 7 servers, 6 that do content delivery, 1 that handles only the website. Each of our 4 US servers are supposed to handle 1000 customers simultaneously. Our busiest server in Washington DC in the past 30 days got up to 280 simultaneous connections. Those who say I put profit before performance are wrong. I have enough server capacity to handle nearly 8X the traffic we have.

That doesn't mean every experience is perfect, we are NOT Youtube with tens of thousands of servers, I have 7. we have 4 in the US, 2 overseas to help our troops that are deployed, not because we have a huge customer base we are profiting from, but to serve our customers who are serving us. Now not only do we not have that many servers, but where Youtube is paying around $0.01/GB, if I were to use the same CDN network of Akami that Netflix / Amazon uses, it would cost me $0.19/GB. That means I could easily be paying out over $25,000/month on bandwidth alone. The advantage would be minimal to our customers. Let me say that again, it would be minimal. Yes there are a few that would benefit, but we have nearly 2000 users per day, out of those about 4-5 contact us with issues, most of those are resolved once they realize they can pick a different server.

Then you have the outlier, the 0.1% where there isn't anything I can do to get them connected. They run speedtests and they are at nearly dialup speeds. Friday night I called a guy to help him with his computer, he lives in Canada, can connect to every website we tried at great speeds, but not one of his computers at the house could connect to even our homepage. He said his brother that lives 3 doors down has no problems at all. I go look at my servers, I have over 1000 total users and no weird spikes in support tickets. I can't identify any problems on my side, I spent 20 minutes helping him with his computer, but ultimately I am not responsible for his internet connection, network, or his PC. I made a few suggestions such as taking his laptop to his brothers and trying it there, then calling his ISP and I haven't heard back.

This didn't start off as some grand business plan, it started out as a way to help users. Each time we identified a gap, we worked to fill it. In some cases it was hardware, in some it was handled through programming. To manage the site it has changed from a small part time job, to one where I spend around 50+ hours a week personally, we also have 2 top level programmers, one full time, the other 20 hours a week. We have a dedicated customer service staff member and we also have Chad full time now. I will NOT apologize for needing to increase prices. Chad has re-recorded nearly every video 3 times in the past 4 years, added multiple versions specific for MCAT, DAT, and College. He has added biochemistry, Biology, Physics, Math (For DAT) and we have added nearly 10 thousand questions to the site.

You are right in your assessment that Chad is not the motivating factor behind price increases, I am. That is because it is my responsibility to make sure he gets his content delivered in the best possible way. He is beyond the most generous person I know, and best partner in the world. You are mostly right that our site would be completely free if it was up to him, but when you have the kind of expenses we have, it isn't free, but together we have tried to put together a resource that every student who was serious about school could afford.

All that being said, if you have any issues with the site, contact us through the site, most things get resolved pretty quickly. I can say that right now our mobile app is glitchy, and we are working on a new version, but everything else is working well on our end, but maybe we can help you figure out what is wrong with your end.

Dr. Alan Halls D.M.D.

CHAD IS MARRIED???!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Dreams crushed.

In all seriousness, thank you guys for what you do!!!
 
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I will retract my statement. Alan rocks, just like Chad does. But btw, I'm in serious need of those A&P videos!
 
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