My daughter took the Princeton Review course over the summer in San Antonio (near the Rim). Her first practice test was a 17, she took the test for real in August and just found out her score was a 32R. She is extremely happy and really does think the class was the key to her success. She is not one to have studied on her own. The class must have hit the important stuff and kept her focused on the key points.
She really debated the Princeton Review vs Kaplan and was glad that she went PR. It had alot of coverage of material that she just needed to go over and remember. There was some strategy as well. I think by and large she thought the teachers were okay - none seemed to stand out good or bad.
Having said all that, there were some real annoyances. The first night, they changed the location by about 3 miles and if i recall, she found out only because she called the original hotel to ask a question about access. Crazy! I am sure they had to have known prior to the day of that they were moving locations.
Then part way through the course, they decided to upgrad the website. This was actually very much needed as we had to downgrade to IE 3 or 4 in order to use the original website. But, the migration was ugly. THey lost kids progress, all the kids lost access to certain tests. It was not pretty. And was done when they were about 3 weeks from completion and several of they were testing the weekend after the course ended. This caused alot of stress and worry that just did not have to happen.
It seemed that the classes were too heavily weighted to Verbal. My daughter ended up skipping alot of these, because really what more can they teach you on that subject. I think there should have been about 4 classes of verbal removed and 2 more each given to the other 2 sections.
