my two cents...
i think that you have answered your own question - if you are not a lecture learning person - don't waste money on lectures you won't attend - and if you are trying to get away - the money might be better spent on checking into a hotel for a month, making a sam's club trip and stocking up on powerbars and coffe, and just locking yourself in a place with no distractions...
if you do want to attend a course:
kaplan - i had barone for path - i really liked him. entertaining, a pathologist in beverly hills, so he has good stories about celebrities, etc. - keeps the classes attention - and he wrote the kaplan path book - so his lectures follow it word for word, and it is easy to follow. my experience was that some of the other teachers were horrible (don't remember the names - but not the ones you listed) and i would have been better off just reading on my own. so as a reading learner - you might be tempted to miss more lectures than you would actually attend.
today was also my last day of one month of PASS. it is amazing - and unlike anything you have ever experienced. one teacher for all subjects - and he is the real deal. the main thing about PASS is a different organization of things you already know. the lectures force you to group diseases, drugs, etc. that you have in your head and combine them in different ways to figure out side effects, cause of death, presenting signs all on your own. once he teaches you patterns of integration for specific groups of diseases for example - you don't have to spend hours of reading to memorize all of the different presenting signs - you are able to figure out what you will see on biopsy, blood gas, signs, symptoms, cause of death, etc. you are somewhat correct in your readings about PASS in the sense that we learned the "90% rules" for most things - and briefly mentioning the exceptions. if you have a set pattern in your head, and it covers 90% of the collagen diseases for example, don't worry about missing some questions on things that are the exceptions - the other 10%. kind of hard to adapt to, but it really has bumped up my understanding and qbank %. especially when confronted with unknown things - if you know that 90% of the time collagen diseases have some trait - when presented with an unknown one - you pick that trait, and know that you have 90% chance of getting it right. kind of hard to put into words - but hopefully you get the drift. i don't know the actual numbers, but plenty of students have scored above the US average, and just like any other course, some students do extremely well, some just pass, and some fail - kaplan has the same distribution. it is also designed for people who have taken the test before and come up short - so if you haven't taken the test yet, you might be better off with another class.
still - if you know you learn from books, and not lectures - board studying is not the time to change your ways - at the end of the day - i would save your money if you truly don't learn from lectures as both kaplan and PASS rely heavily on abou 8 hours of lecture a day.
