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Since my friends and I have been getting services from the P.A.S.S. Program for the last few years, I feel it important to share some warnings with you that will keep you out of harm's way, save you the most money possible while still get a high-yield study experience for you. I went there because it appeared that I would have great Christian environment that had my best interests in mind but religion is the last priority this place has, your money is the first. I searched this topic and saw many questions but no in-depth answers after going through pages of them, so I took a lot of time to try and answer them below. This is not a troll and there is NO proprietary information shared since ALL of it comes from other sources readily available on the Internet.
First and foremost the place really doesn't care about you, it's your money that they will go after every hour of every day and their goal is to get $15,000 from everyone that walks through their door, and they're perfectly fine with 'only' making an 8-week student out of you that can get them at least $10,000 if you think you were only going to stay for the original 4 weeks or that $15,000 if you planned on only staying for 8. If you are from a Caribbean or Dominican school, you pay half price for everything and the people making up the difference is the U.S. and Canadian students. Nothing you can do about it, but you should know why only a small percent of the students and tutors are U.S. students anymore...Ask to see the amounts of the charitable donations vs. their profits and you'll see that very little of the tuition or the Breaking the Boards series actually goes to the charities, so don't think you're doing anyone a favor by donating more and more money to them while you're there; the car show callously parked outside is what you're paying for.
The course itself is made up of a few components:
1. The teachers: For the Champaign headquarters, Dr. Francis is an outstanding and knowledgeable teacher. Make sure you are at his side as much as possible for the duration of the stay in Champaign because he doesn't teach much more than half the course, which is a tragedy for those that came specifically to learn from him. Dr. Le has taken over most of the teaching responsibilities and while she is brilliant, she will browbeat and embarrass you in class, to the point that people stop going to the classes they paid for and go back to watching the bootleg videos they've had for years. If you still want to go there the best advice is to buy skin-tone earplugs to wear during class and get as many of her study packets as you can. If you have dates in mind to attend the course, have them send you a teaching schedule with how much of the teaching will be done by he vs. she.
For the Florida office: Dr. Wolf is the head instructor there but I can't say much about him because nobody seems to be able to find him after the first week. A minimum-wage tutor or another person that has never actually practiced medicine ends up teaching a lot of the class, just like in Champaign!
2. Tutoring: You'd think you'd be getting taught medicine in your weakest areas, but most of the tutors barely finished their first or second years of medical school and are on some sort of extended vacation from their school while waiting to take Step 1 while a few are working on Step 2. The medical instruction, therefore, is minimal. They focus; instead, on making sure you adhere to the test taking mantra they instill in you that is borrowed, mostly, from Kaplan and a basic test-taking skills course offered at most community colleges. The technique does tend to improve your performance on exams so just make sure you buy a U-World account then do 25 questions at a time doing the following for every one of them:
1. Cover the answers with the U-World calculator or the Windows Notepad or Calculator.
2. Read the question at the end, if it seems to involve a lot of physiology, management or extended 3rd order thinking, ask yourself "What's the concept they want to test me on?" If it just wants a diagnosis question, they want you to find the clue to get the answer below.
3. Read the vignette actively looking for the concept or clue and highlight anything that is relevant and formulate your answer from those highlighted items.
4. Only after you have your best guess solidified, start eliminating the answers from the last answer upward, don't ever pick 'A' unless you're absolutely certain that's the answer because it rarely ever is. If you don't have (literally) a clue, eliminate as many answers as possible and pick the last of the ones that are left.
They charge almost $200/hour for this tutoring, which may be on par with Kaplan but Kaplan pays their tutors at least triple what the PASS tutors get paid ($10/hour vs. $30-$40/hour) so only the ones that feel an intense loyalty to the place are staying, the best tutors are rarely there for long or are already on their way out. This is one example of PASS exploiting the students and their tutors to make every last penny for themselves. I can't imagine working so hard for less than the person making my $5 coffee for me at Starbucks; eventually it's got to get to the students they suckered into tutoring and that's what you'll be buying into when you extend your stay.
Materials: You get a folder with the PowerPoints for all of the lectures and a blue book which has summaries of all the lecture high-points and the infamous "P.A.S.S. Program Clues" which are a rehash of the Med Student Amnesia doc and Boards and Wards. The materials you get and anything the instructors project in front of you have to be some of the lowest quality, most error-ridden junk I've ever paid thousands of dollars for. If you're trying to avoid spending the money to attend a PASS course, buy the Blue "Dissecting USMLE" and the "Breaking the Boards" books (the fully corrected versions of what all the lectures are,) and memorize the clues in the blue book then drill back and forth with as many friends as you can find to do it and you can avoid spending thousands more to be read the WRONG information in class. You know it's bad when the director of the program with 10 years of experience needs to get a medical student to correct his materials properly! Pdf files of all of these are floating around for free and anyone who's attended the course has them, whether they admit it or not.
Housing: P.A.S.S. gets you the lowest rent, Section 8 housing full of thugs that always are breaking into someone's car for the iPods or laptops that students often leave in their car. There is unarmed security 3 nights a week, but they're always at the gate and the dealers in the Champaign area meet with the main one on nights when security isn't there. If you see anyone with dreadlocks walking around or too old to be on a skateboard, they are likely to be armed and going to the main dealer, which is the first building on the left (go through there and you'll smell which apartment to go to to buy some recreational drugs) when you come to the P.A.S.S. side of the complex. If you have pepper-spray, make sure you take the safety off before you leave the P.A.S.S. lot to walk or drive home.
The apartments are always occupied by P.A.S.S. students so that's their excuse for never really cleaning them. The carpets are sticky, crackle under your feet and hold all sorts of diseases but no amount of requests will make them clean them; not that you should have to ask them to. Your comforter was NOT cleaned after the last person so wash it in hot with everything you can get to kill the last person's germs that are embedded in there. There is also a 50/50 chance that your AC unit isn't working right and they won't get it working without many requests and having them replace the Freon in it practically requires Dr. Francis and the mayor to sign for it. That maintenance request you have the first day should be thoroughly filled out if any of the above are going on and give the front desk a daily update as to if anyone has stopped by to work on it.
For all of this, P.A.S.S. charges you almost TRIPLE what your non-P.A.S.S. neighbors pay to live there! The Village charges them $300/month per room and they charge you $700+. Remember how I mentioned that they will exploit students and tutors that live there to make money off of them??? If you absolutely have to attend a P.A.S.S. Program session, use Craigslist to find one of many sublets that are out there any time of year that are much safer and cost-effective. If you don't want to pay to rent a car, drive your own down there, pay a taxi around $12 each way from downtown or stay at the much safer Candlewood Suites or Extended Stay's that you can still walk from. You can get a 'deal' at those 2 places for around $1200/month if you absolutely have to stay within walking distance. If you want to risk it, at least save some money and ask them for the "2 month P.A.S.S. Program rental" which costs for 2 months slightly more than P.A.S.S. charges you for one month.
http://www.uvchampaign.com/floor.php?UTypeID=26502
http://www.apartmentratings.com/rate/IL-Champaign-University-Village-at-Champaign-1412481.html
The Game: When you come in, you're put under stress when you first check in and there are a bunch of things wrong with your apartment. Starting the next day, you are stressed every morning at 6:30AM when you do questions in the classroom before the lectures start then keep going through the day, fighting to stay awake in case you get called on. If it's a basic answer that may even be on the board, know that he caught you dozing off and he'll be on your case again for a while. Too bad you can't even see the board because his brother, V-Tini, wouldn't spend the small extra money to get a 10,000 lumen projector with 10,000 to 1 contrast (this took me less than 15 minutes to find with Google and I'm not anywhere near technically inclined) needed to fight through that horrible room lighting.
Just when you're tired of muddling through the crappy notes in the folder, they offer the "Breaking the Boards" books and most people bought it since they were already so fed up with the notes. Again, pdfs and recordings of this and the PP Clues are available for free if you quietly ask around; they actually used to be free or very little cost before V-Tini took over. They will make you feel like you absolutely have to stay if you want to pass your exam. You can read their materials over and over again, do drills by Skype with anyone that can read English and tell you what you missed, do U World questions and take an NBME every 3 weeks on your own and without spending a penny with P.A.S.S. P.A.S.S. knows that many schools send students to P.A.S.S. against their will and those are the ones they snare immediately into their 8-week program. If you're in that situation, try and negotiate this with your school before this place gets thousands more dollars from you. Even the privilege of staying in the building really isn't one, it's even more run down than the village apartments and people still sneak around after 10PM until the cleaning crew is gone so it's unsafe for you to even leave your room.
I hope this helps someone before it's too late and bless all of you on this incredible journey.
First and foremost the place really doesn't care about you, it's your money that they will go after every hour of every day and their goal is to get $15,000 from everyone that walks through their door, and they're perfectly fine with 'only' making an 8-week student out of you that can get them at least $10,000 if you think you were only going to stay for the original 4 weeks or that $15,000 if you planned on only staying for 8. If you are from a Caribbean or Dominican school, you pay half price for everything and the people making up the difference is the U.S. and Canadian students. Nothing you can do about it, but you should know why only a small percent of the students and tutors are U.S. students anymore...Ask to see the amounts of the charitable donations vs. their profits and you'll see that very little of the tuition or the Breaking the Boards series actually goes to the charities, so don't think you're doing anyone a favor by donating more and more money to them while you're there; the car show callously parked outside is what you're paying for.
The course itself is made up of a few components:
1. The teachers: For the Champaign headquarters, Dr. Francis is an outstanding and knowledgeable teacher. Make sure you are at his side as much as possible for the duration of the stay in Champaign because he doesn't teach much more than half the course, which is a tragedy for those that came specifically to learn from him. Dr. Le has taken over most of the teaching responsibilities and while she is brilliant, she will browbeat and embarrass you in class, to the point that people stop going to the classes they paid for and go back to watching the bootleg videos they've had for years. If you still want to go there the best advice is to buy skin-tone earplugs to wear during class and get as many of her study packets as you can. If you have dates in mind to attend the course, have them send you a teaching schedule with how much of the teaching will be done by he vs. she.
For the Florida office: Dr. Wolf is the head instructor there but I can't say much about him because nobody seems to be able to find him after the first week. A minimum-wage tutor or another person that has never actually practiced medicine ends up teaching a lot of the class, just like in Champaign!
2. Tutoring: You'd think you'd be getting taught medicine in your weakest areas, but most of the tutors barely finished their first or second years of medical school and are on some sort of extended vacation from their school while waiting to take Step 1 while a few are working on Step 2. The medical instruction, therefore, is minimal. They focus; instead, on making sure you adhere to the test taking mantra they instill in you that is borrowed, mostly, from Kaplan and a basic test-taking skills course offered at most community colleges. The technique does tend to improve your performance on exams so just make sure you buy a U-World account then do 25 questions at a time doing the following for every one of them:
1. Cover the answers with the U-World calculator or the Windows Notepad or Calculator.
2. Read the question at the end, if it seems to involve a lot of physiology, management or extended 3rd order thinking, ask yourself "What's the concept they want to test me on?" If it just wants a diagnosis question, they want you to find the clue to get the answer below.
3. Read the vignette actively looking for the concept or clue and highlight anything that is relevant and formulate your answer from those highlighted items.
4. Only after you have your best guess solidified, start eliminating the answers from the last answer upward, don't ever pick 'A' unless you're absolutely certain that's the answer because it rarely ever is. If you don't have (literally) a clue, eliminate as many answers as possible and pick the last of the ones that are left.
They charge almost $200/hour for this tutoring, which may be on par with Kaplan but Kaplan pays their tutors at least triple what the PASS tutors get paid ($10/hour vs. $30-$40/hour) so only the ones that feel an intense loyalty to the place are staying, the best tutors are rarely there for long or are already on their way out. This is one example of PASS exploiting the students and their tutors to make every last penny for themselves. I can't imagine working so hard for less than the person making my $5 coffee for me at Starbucks; eventually it's got to get to the students they suckered into tutoring and that's what you'll be buying into when you extend your stay.
Materials: You get a folder with the PowerPoints for all of the lectures and a blue book which has summaries of all the lecture high-points and the infamous "P.A.S.S. Program Clues" which are a rehash of the Med Student Amnesia doc and Boards and Wards. The materials you get and anything the instructors project in front of you have to be some of the lowest quality, most error-ridden junk I've ever paid thousands of dollars for. If you're trying to avoid spending the money to attend a PASS course, buy the Blue "Dissecting USMLE" and the "Breaking the Boards" books (the fully corrected versions of what all the lectures are,) and memorize the clues in the blue book then drill back and forth with as many friends as you can find to do it and you can avoid spending thousands more to be read the WRONG information in class. You know it's bad when the director of the program with 10 years of experience needs to get a medical student to correct his materials properly! Pdf files of all of these are floating around for free and anyone who's attended the course has them, whether they admit it or not.
Housing: P.A.S.S. gets you the lowest rent, Section 8 housing full of thugs that always are breaking into someone's car for the iPods or laptops that students often leave in their car. There is unarmed security 3 nights a week, but they're always at the gate and the dealers in the Champaign area meet with the main one on nights when security isn't there. If you see anyone with dreadlocks walking around or too old to be on a skateboard, they are likely to be armed and going to the main dealer, which is the first building on the left (go through there and you'll smell which apartment to go to to buy some recreational drugs) when you come to the P.A.S.S. side of the complex. If you have pepper-spray, make sure you take the safety off before you leave the P.A.S.S. lot to walk or drive home.
The apartments are always occupied by P.A.S.S. students so that's their excuse for never really cleaning them. The carpets are sticky, crackle under your feet and hold all sorts of diseases but no amount of requests will make them clean them; not that you should have to ask them to. Your comforter was NOT cleaned after the last person so wash it in hot with everything you can get to kill the last person's germs that are embedded in there. There is also a 50/50 chance that your AC unit isn't working right and they won't get it working without many requests and having them replace the Freon in it practically requires Dr. Francis and the mayor to sign for it. That maintenance request you have the first day should be thoroughly filled out if any of the above are going on and give the front desk a daily update as to if anyone has stopped by to work on it.
For all of this, P.A.S.S. charges you almost TRIPLE what your non-P.A.S.S. neighbors pay to live there! The Village charges them $300/month per room and they charge you $700+. Remember how I mentioned that they will exploit students and tutors that live there to make money off of them??? If you absolutely have to attend a P.A.S.S. Program session, use Craigslist to find one of many sublets that are out there any time of year that are much safer and cost-effective. If you don't want to pay to rent a car, drive your own down there, pay a taxi around $12 each way from downtown or stay at the much safer Candlewood Suites or Extended Stay's that you can still walk from. You can get a 'deal' at those 2 places for around $1200/month if you absolutely have to stay within walking distance. If you want to risk it, at least save some money and ask them for the "2 month P.A.S.S. Program rental" which costs for 2 months slightly more than P.A.S.S. charges you for one month.
http://www.uvchampaign.com/floor.php?UTypeID=26502
http://www.apartmentratings.com/rate/IL-Champaign-University-Village-at-Champaign-1412481.html
The Game: When you come in, you're put under stress when you first check in and there are a bunch of things wrong with your apartment. Starting the next day, you are stressed every morning at 6:30AM when you do questions in the classroom before the lectures start then keep going through the day, fighting to stay awake in case you get called on. If it's a basic answer that may even be on the board, know that he caught you dozing off and he'll be on your case again for a while. Too bad you can't even see the board because his brother, V-Tini, wouldn't spend the small extra money to get a 10,000 lumen projector with 10,000 to 1 contrast (this took me less than 15 minutes to find with Google and I'm not anywhere near technically inclined) needed to fight through that horrible room lighting.
Just when you're tired of muddling through the crappy notes in the folder, they offer the "Breaking the Boards" books and most people bought it since they were already so fed up with the notes. Again, pdfs and recordings of this and the PP Clues are available for free if you quietly ask around; they actually used to be free or very little cost before V-Tini took over. They will make you feel like you absolutely have to stay if you want to pass your exam. You can read their materials over and over again, do drills by Skype with anyone that can read English and tell you what you missed, do U World questions and take an NBME every 3 weeks on your own and without spending a penny with P.A.S.S. P.A.S.S. knows that many schools send students to P.A.S.S. against their will and those are the ones they snare immediately into their 8-week program. If you're in that situation, try and negotiate this with your school before this place gets thousands more dollars from you. Even the privilege of staying in the building really isn't one, it's even more run down than the village apartments and people still sneak around after 10PM until the cleaning crew is gone so it's unsafe for you to even leave your room.
I hope this helps someone before it's too late and bless all of you on this incredible journey.
