Originally posted by Mudd
Where do you get those prices?
call your local kaplan center
The last time I looked, and this is when I was trying to set a price for tutoring, they wanted an extra $1000 on top of the course price for 10 hours of private tutoring. That equals $100/hour, just like EVERYONE else except you has used as the price.
again reading carefully seems to be a problem when hasty responses are in a rush to be formulated. When choosing one of kaplan's 15,25, or 35 hour programs you get the class for free. if you choose to do anything less than 15 then you do have to pay for the course. notice the example i used had 35 hours of tutoring in it!
Also, considering the original author stated "...paid $100/hour for MCAT tutoring with one of the national prep companies." and you described the Kaplan course costs, it seems that you recognized Kaplan as the national prep company charging $100/hour for tutoring.
kaplan has been a national test prep company in mcat preparation for 65 years, and they charge $100/hr if you choose individual hours less than the 15 hour package. and they do have extensive satisfaction guarantees to make sure the tutee is happy. again i urge you and everyon else to call and find out what those guarantees are for yourself, you'd be surprised. if you need the number its 888-kaptest. To answer your concern directly, kaplan prepares more than 50% of students who take mcat prep courses, and 79% of first year medical students who took a prep course took kaplan. You figure out the math, but i think that means that if a person is talking about national test prep, they're probably talking about kaplan. p.s. in case you haven't noticed those statistics show that kaplan works better than other prep courses when it means being a first year med student.
I'd have more respect for your opinions if every post wasn't aimed at defending and/or selling a company that is so profit driven.
I only aim to correct misconceptions / accusations regarding kaplan. I do this since i'm a teacher and i feel pretty strongly about our program.
I am sure they have some good points, as people here have mentioned. They also have some bad points. That is true of every program. But your drive to sell Kaplan at every turn, without recognizing their faults and inherent greed makes me wonder what your motive is.
we don't claim to be perfect, although we strive for it! But we do claim to be the best. we're the only company to ever hire EXTERNAL auditors from pricewaterhouse coopers to audit our score guarantee. princeton hired their own people !!?? and as far as i know examcrackers is small enough to again do its own internal auditing.
I am curious to hear from someone else about the price.
call 888-kaptest
Nice list, except their is an even better question that can't outdo all of those: "Will they let me have an hour of free tutoring before extracting thousands of dollars from my pocket, so that I can see if the tutoring is worth the money?" If the tutoring is truly worth the money, a company should be willing to let you try it out for free to make sure it fits.
there is a satisfaction guarantee that will refund your money if you're not happy. you do have to pay for the tutoring you've done, but consider this, you always have a choice of tutors. If you're not happy with your tutor they'll give you another one, and if you have a good reason, they'll give you the hours you did with the other person for free.
The questions you list sound great from a prep company's perspective, because they can control the answer to every question. I'd hope students would ask questions that had the student's interest in mind. Watching them teach from a prescripted lecture might be close, but it's not the same as actual tutoring, where the tutor must think on their feet.
as great as "thinking on your feet" may be. When you're paying $100 per hour you don't have time for your tutor to think on their feet. You are supposed to have a prescribed plan for what you're doing that you get from your feedback reports. In addiition your tutor prepares any tests you've taken ahead of time to make sure that they've worked out the best possible route to a solution. Its all about trying to get the students higher scores instead of impress them with how you can balance yourself on three toes while juggling a ball and answer 3 physics questions. (that would be interesting to see
🙂 )
As a point of interest, before I tutor anyone privately, I meet them for one hour of free tutoring to set goals, make suggestions on how to maximize our time together, find out what materials they are using as their main reference (this way I can anticipate their questions better and make it more time efficient), answer general and topic-specific questions, and present a thirty minute synopsis of the topic they find most difficult. If Kaplan's tutoring is so strong, shouldn't they do the same. Doing that would sell the tutoring even more.
hey that makes two of us! in fact we go through the students diagnostic results and what the errors mean in when in clusters vs. when they're scattered. We also look at which answer choices a student put as wrong and diagnose the problem based on the pathology of the incorrect choice......and then formulate a plan to START tutoring.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say with second sentence exactly, but I gather you do not tutor the writing or verbal. Me either.
whoops! jumbled thoughts, what i meant is the person should not be tutoring and should be approached with skepticism
😉
I do find your logic interesting though. You say that tutoring is only about $50/hour ($1650/35 hours) because you get the live course included for the $3000. This means that you are saying the live course is worth $1350 to help illustrate your point. Later, in question #3, you mention that the course is free. I love how you can subtract the $1350 from the course cost at one point and then say it's "free" just a few sentences later. I'd be more apt to buy your salespitch if it had a bit more consistency.
I apologize if what i said seems incostitent or unclear. I simply assumed you could figure out the logic involved, however simple it may be. What i was implying by "free" was that you do not have to pay for it. What i was implying by $1350, was that were you to opt out of our tutoring packages you would have to pay $1350 for the same service. So in effect a tutoring student is receiving a $1350 course for "free". In fact within your tutoring period (anything from 3 months to 1 or more years) you can observe as many classes and instructors as you wish in any center you wish in the country. We have mcat classes that take place every month in year in most centers except for a little lull during september (actually there are courses in september in the major metropolitan areas). The accessibility and amount of content and passage practice quality is unmatched by any other large or small test prep company out there. As for my responses being a salespitch, i urge you to answer the questions i posed academically in my original post on behalf of EK (if you're in that capacity), without further circumventing them with anecdotal half-truths. Here they are for your convenience:
1. what are the teacher's average in class evaluations? every prep company uses these and can provide them to you!
2. what is the average score increase per student for that teacher. again this is data that can be pulled if you threaten to walk.
3. Ask if this person is currently teaching a class. If you were doing kaplan's tutoring for example you might want to have your tutor as your teacher as well since you're entitled to the class for free.
4. finally, find out if the prep company offers separate tutor training to its tutors. Don't settle for a yes, ask about the details of the training program.
and
5. "Will they let me have an hour of free tutoring before extracting thousands of dollars from my pocket, so that I can see if the tutoring is worth the money?" [courtesy of mudd]
