... With an average score of over 36 for the 10 instructors...
Regardless, if you want a real number, 10 instructors will be available ...
Lastly, the program goes beyond MCAT by working an admissions component into the weekly schedule ... and even an appearance from someone many of you have heard from here on the forums.
Regarding the facilities themselves, my undestanding [sic] is the princeton review austin program runs from the princeton review office and students stay at austin UT dorms. With the kaplan program you go nowhere near a kaplan center, the entire program is self-contained on-site at BU...
The idea is to ... give you the best ammenities [sic] possible ... and use the resources of the only program that has 11,000+ questions of available practice content.
ihd (in-house development?): Funny, the OP was asking about TPR's program, not yours. I've tried to refrain from touting our program too much in the thread on the Kaplan program, but given your lengthy advertisement here I need to address some points.
- Average score of 36 for the instructors? Congratulations. We all know that high scores are only a tiny part of being qualified to teach. Our two principal teachers (the TPR program will be much smaller than Kaplan's) have scored a combined 83, but that's not what makes us good: it's the years of experience (minimum five; I note that many of the Kaplan instructors have less than two, and some are actually just graduating from college). It's the literally hundreds of classes we have taught. It's the hours per year -- for example, I taught over 1000 hours in the classroom last year. It's the work in product development -- how many of those ten Kaplan instructors actually write the books? Only one of our Ultimate instructors does
not do such work.
How about you list median years of experience for your instructor corps? Or median hours of classes and tutoring? Ours would probably be five years, and at least a couple thousand hours.
- 10 instructors, but for how many students? We will maintain a ratio of about 6 to 1 -- in what sense is a bigger program better? Doesn't that just mean less time with the top guys? With the "guest lecturer" whose picture is at the top of the page? If we get enough enrollment that we exceed that six to one ratio, we'll add somebody else, whose credentials are just as impressive as those cited above.
- all those extra programs? Again, congratulations. But shouldn't your students be studying the material that's actually tested on the MCAT? We will have some similar programs, and will have consultations in application writing and the like available before and after the program; for the most part, however, we expect students to be writing their applications on their own time, probably before they arrive. Our fifteen hours per day is devoted almost exclusively to improving MCAT scores, with appropriate relaxation time. (If you find hearing from panels of med students relaxing, good for you.)
- Facilities? Heaven forfend you get near an office. Our students will not have to leave the building, as their rooms, the food, and the classrooms are all right here. Why it's bad to have office facilities nearby is beyond me.
- Amenities? Um, who cares? Isn't the point to improve the scores? How do those floor-to-ceiling windows cited in the other thread (which you link to) help people get into medical school?
- 11,000 questions? Yep, that'll really help people in a high-intensity, shortened program. I think our several thousand questions will be enough, don't you?
- An appearance by somebody you've heard from on this forum? Wow. Amazing. Somebody from SDN, teaching an MCAT class. Who'd have thought.
With Ultimate, students won't be getting fancy-shmancy facilities with fairly new instructors and an occasional guest lecture from somebody really good. They'll be getting all day, every day attention from two teachers who've had stellar reviews for the past five years. They'll learn their physics and their verbal reasoning from me, not from whichever undergrad they're randomly assigned to. They'll learn their chemistry from Chris Manuel, the only teacher I know who gets higher student satisfaction ratings than I do (darn it). Biology -- again, taught by teachers (including me) who have been at the top of the heap for years. And if it gets big enough to justify it, we'll bring in more of the company's biggest guns.
While vehemently making your points, please avoid personally attacking other posters; you don't have to call other people idiots in order to disagree with them.
This doesn't just happen at the med school admissions level, either. I don't know about TPR, but Kaplan actually has the same kind of intensive residential course for boards, and for the same hefty price. I can guarantee you that I won't be paying to take that one next year, either. 
