Here we are again.
So where is there really research to support that students who take 8 AAMCs don't do better than those who take 5? How was 5 determined to be the magic number? I think I take the most objection to the prescriptive nature of Examkrackers.
You offer 5 of the 8 AAMCs because one more would be too much. Additional questions are only required for special circumstances, and would otherwise overwhelm a normal student.
Maybe so, but other companies give me the option to decide for myself, without paying more money. If I want to take a 6th, 7th or 8th practice test, I can. If I want to spend hours going though a 1000 question test bank, it's available. Sure, it might be more than the average student needs, but for $2000, every possible resource is available.
Frankly, this is analogous to what I think is wrong with medicine today and why I want to be a doctor. Listen to your patients' (or students') needs and don't just tell them that you know best what is best for everybody. Learning, like a person's health, is incredibly personal. Maybe most students would do best to follow your magic formula, but you don't give any other options.
And as for quality vs. quantity, I think the fast food example is overreaching a bit--that is unless you're willing to admit that your entrees have been sitting under a heat lamp since 2007. You know what make the French Laundry the best restaurant in the world? Fresh and innovative cuisine. A menu that changes daily to reflect what is current and important at that moment.
The EK materials are at least 4 years old (the 16 mini mcats is closer to 7 or 8) and need to be refreshed. The website says that errata are almost nonexistent, but I have to ask why EK hasn't at least published an edition fixing all of the admitted errors, let alone reviewing the material, in half a decade. For a company claiming that hard work and dedication is so important, I don't see it when you are still publishing physics books with section headers like "Fiction."
The simple fact is, considering EK charges as much as the big guys (don't get me wrong, I love an underdog), they need to act like one. Publish a new edition once and a while. The EK forum has year-old posts from people asking when the 8th edition is going to come out, for crying out loud. How much do you really pay to offer your students 5 of the 8 AAMCs? Would 3 more cut into the profit margin that much? And speaking of that, tell me, if instructors are paid more or less based on student reviews, do you refund the difference to the students with the bad instructors? Or are you telling me that Examkrackers pockets extra money when they have poorly reviewed teachers? Who does that economic incentive really benefit?
I can believe that you believe you are doing what's best for students, but right now I'm not convinced that Examkrackers isn't packing snake oil for you to sell.
Hackintosh, thanks for your patience. I'll try to respond to your questions and analogies systematically.
There is no magic number, of course. There's no research that says 6 is 10% better than 5 at 15% extra cost or anything like that. The evidence that went into our format is experiential and empirical. Probably anecdotal as well. The people who made EK worked for years as test prep instructors/trainers beforehand and I trust their judgment (and results) over conventional wisdom.
As for the amount, the format is such as to fit the majority of students' needs. More tests are available, as are questions. So you're not handcuffed. You object also to the fact that they're not complimentary. I don't set prices, so I can only repeat that it's probably an issue of the price being set because of a combination of quality and economies of scale. I assure you that we're not all living in mansions while keeping you out of med school. Quite the opposite.
As for deciding things based on patients'/students' needs - I think you're speaking more to wants, not needs. If patients ask for more meds, higher doses, if they think that a little bit of physical therapy or a pap smear every two years for cervical cancer screening is good, then why not a lot of PT, why not pap smears every 6 months? A good doctor knows how much is recommended for the average patient, and when too much of a good thing does more harm than good. This is not some marketing ploy I'm telling you. This is the exact thinking that went into deciding how much we give our students. I've had students of mine, during breaks, hand out practice tests they'd downloaded online, charging each other a nominal fee to cover the cost of printing out dozens and dozens of tests. It's this mentality that I have to fight every course. This is NOT the way to a good score. And if not offering students more tests and questions and forcing all but the more resourceful/determined students from doing more, then I'm happy for that.
For years, I used to mention in my introductory lecture that while EK has other books, as do other companies, I strongly discourage students from getting them all and thinking that more is better. I would speak to them about the pre-med mentality that getting a huge stack of books, dropping them on a table with a resounding thud, and saying to oneself, "This is all the knowledge that could ever be tested on the MCAT. I will master all of this and then destroy the test." And I would point out that it was detrimental and counter-productive, that almost all of those students would fail to get through any large portion of that, let alone master any significant portion of it, and that they'd muddle up the information in their head, not get a good grasp of the important concepts, and burn out. Then, one day, I went to promote EK at a school and was surprised to find that it was a head-to-head promotion with Kaplan and TPR. The TPR rep actually took out a large stack of books and dropped them on the table dramatically to elicit that thud and make the point that they had so much to offer, and I had to laugh when it was my turn to tell the students that that was exactly what we wanted not to be. I actually bought the EK books based solely on their thinness, and I was happy I did. I think you'll see this better when you're in med school and you stop trying to know all that there is to know and focus first and most importantly on really mastering the high-yield, essential information/concepts. EK doesn't claim to teach everything that could be on the test, but instead, to focus on 95% of what will be on each test, and we have to fight students always to keep them from going that other route. EK and I can have the arrogance to say that we know what students need because we've been students, we've succeeded on the MCAT, and we've helped students for years. I see that now, but did not when I was studying for the MCAT.
I've taught and tutored so many students over the years who had previously taken TPR/Kaplan courses and were overwhelmed by the amount of material and information given and underwhelmed by the instruction. In fact, those students are disproportionately represented amongst those who seek private tutoring or take our MCAT Extra course. I don't recall meeting many, or any, students in person who had bad experiences with EK and subsequent good experiences with TPR/Kaplan. Have you?
Oh, and why 5? It works into our format. Students take tests every second week and are prepared in about 9-10 weeks to take the real thing. Many students try to save tests for the end, or try to hoard them from other sources to do all at once at the end and this hurts, not helps, them. As I've been saying until I've turned blue in the face - you don't get better from taking practice tests. You get better from reviewing them. You have to spend as much time reviewing them as you do taking them. Otherwise, just taking a bunch of practice tests, you won't improve from test to test, because you're the same person from one to the next. You haven't changed and neither will your score. 5 is plenty. Taking more will steer you away from a more comprehensive approach, like using our comprehensive set and 16 mini mcats book to make sure you cover all the topics.
Your fast food comment is clever, but I think a more apt analogy than French Laundry changing its menu is if the FDA changed its RDAs from year to year (or day to day? Did you wish to give a literal recommendation?) and decided that this year we should make sure that women of reproductive age should have high quantities of copper in their diet instead of folic acid just to switch things up a bit so people don't get bored or think they've stopped caring. Food is food. The changing taste is pleasing to our palate, but the nutrients in French Laundry's food doesn't change significantly. They surely haven't started putting non-edible or purely synthetic components into their food or had a trans-fat theme/promotion for a given week. They're just mixing up the ingredients. It's the form and presentation that's changed. We've been changing the form and presentation of our materials over the years, but the nutritional value has stayed pretty much the same, and the only change is that it's improved slightly. If a more than slight improvement is desired, I suppose that's our fault for setting the bar so high in the first place. There's only so much room for improvement when you're already this good.
In all the schooling I've done, I would always be mad at professors who would insist on the newest edition of the books we use in the class. They'd make it impossible for us to buy used books for cheap just because a few graphs and paragraphs were moved around in the new edition. We're doing students a favor. If they want to study on their own with a set of hand-me-down books, we're fine with that. We won't get more money, but at least they'll be in good hands and will likely recommend our materials to others. If they have a set of hand-me-downs, they can buy our course without those books and get a discount. Are you saying we should revamp a set of books that work, waste the time of a number of authors and editors, and force students to spend more money than they already are? Are you saying that other companies do this? From what I've seen, the big guys have only changed the look of their books, made them thinner and more numerous instead of tomes, made them less dry and more colorful. While our books were always thin, we've also made them more colorful. But the black text is really where it's at and we're still superior there.
The complete set of books are revamped every few years, and the errata that we publish online are fixed in each new edition. It HAS been a few years since our last edition, but so what? Perhaps we ran out of new colors to put into our books, I don't know. The content is still incredible. Did the AAMC stop testing Physics and include a section on Psychology or something? Why is it so necessary that we would have changed our books? I've seen the most recent exam the AAMC has made available online, and it's no different than any test I'd seen previously. I'd rock that test just as I rocked tests pre-2006. I'm only teaching my students what I know, so I am not worried for them one bit.
Oh, I didn't understand the "Physics books with section headers like 'Fiction'" reference.
Hmm, again, with money, I'm not involved in that aspect. But we have very few "bad" teachers and they don't last more than a few weeks (as long as it takes for the first set of evaluations to come in, for us to speak to the instructor and try to resolve the situation and support him/her, and for us to confirm there's been no change). In most classes, there are a minority of students who have negative things to say about their instructors regardless of how the rest of the class felt. It's been rare that instructors have really turned out to be bad. We don't have a set policy on how to handle that. In our region, I've taken over those classes at times, or taught complimentary review or tutoring classes, free of charge. We've always tried to find the best way to make sure the students got the knowledge and instruction and practice they had missed out on. I'm not sure who's convinced you that we're evil and hellbent on bleeding our students dry, but we've worked very hard to keep our students happy, and several of my students have been in regular contact with my supervisor and my supervisor's supervisor over the years because they were especially proactive and had a lot of questions and requests to improve their experience. They'd be on a first name basis and be texting the national coordinator for all EK programs and would know what's going on in EK as much as I did. If the EK policies with which you're so familiar seem cold or whatever to you, it's because we're trying always to not let our instructors suffer at the expense of our catering to the whims of students, or to keep the company from being screwed over by students who are litigious. Such students are a small minority, but a vocal one, and they take away time and resources that are better spent elsewhere. Students who don't interact with EK with such a decidedly contrary or contentious bent are generally very happy with their experiences and with the support that they get. People who just want to pay less or who want their money back for any perceived slight or shortcoming might be disappointed, but such an outcome is not outside of plausibility, though they might be better served to ask what EK can do to make sure that they improve their scores.
I'm not telling you any of those things you inferred. When instructors don't teach well, it hurts them and it hurts EK in addition to hurting the students. Again, the pay is pretty good even when the instructors don't get a bonus, but that's not an option. If they're not getting average evaluations of 7 or higher out of 10, they're not kept around. So if their bonus is decent, but not great, EK might get to keep more of the students' money, but that means that the next class taught at that site will have a harder time filling its class. For all our efforts to help students, EK is still also running a business and not looking to operate at a loss. So while students and instructors alike benefit from higher evaluations, EK does too because more students will be likely to recommend the course/site to other students, so EK doesn't come out behind at the expense of instructors. It's an incentive to benefit everyone involved, and there's no conspiracy to keep mediocre teachers in place for the sake of the bottom line. Not only is that unethical, but it also makes little fiscal sense. Man, it's good to know my economics degree came in handy for something.
As for your not being convinced that EK is not selling snake oil...it's good that I'm the EK instructor and not you. It's good that you give me the benefit of the doubt, but I'm also intelligent enough to know whether what I'm selling to students all these years has been helpful to them, or something in which I could believe. I'm not sure what it would take to convince you. You seem wholly unfamiliar with our materials, though well-read when it comes to their publication dates and our policies. If you are indeed a student (you sound more like a consultant, but while all the criticism is good in that it helps us to look inward and consider tinkering with our approach, I'm not sure how it helps you with clarity. If you're so convinced we're shady, why bother with us at all? Why not avoid us? Do you think all the people who rave about EK materials and courses are lying or are paid by us? Are you hoping to improve EK and acting as an unpaid consultant? Or an unpaid promoter of other companies?), go to a Barnes and Nobel, pick a topic in which you're weak, and look it up in our books and in our competitors' books (or borrow books from people who've taken these courses). Don't just count the number of problems offered, but also do those problems and read through the explanations and see if you understand the concepts and feel more confident after using our methods or theirs. If it's theirs, by all means, use their materials and take their courses, and save yourself all the frustrations you have with our policies and publications. As we discuss in our Zen Day lecture, it's in your best interest to stay positive and distraction-free as you approach MCAT studying, to not associate it with so much frustration. And as for the choice you'll make for MCAT prep, to each his own.
As always, best of luck!
