I've heard great things about The Berkeley Review, but it seems that it's not as developed as The Princeton Review or Kaplan
Hopefully I can shed some light on what we do, but I'm curious what you mean by
seems that it's not as developed.
I know that they certainly advertise more than we do. They sponsor more events on campus and have significantly more name recognition than us. Name recognition could certainly lead to the perception of being developed. But for a serious premed who thoroughly shops, they'll find all three of us and hopefully do their due dilligence. As a small company, we have accepted that we will not be recognized by about half of the potential students. What we lose in quantity is compensated in quality. The casual student who enrolls solely based on name recognition is not necessarily our ideal student. When they overlook us, we end up having a more dedicated class filled with students who sought us out. Anyone who enrolls, truly wants to be there. Such a committment to the MCAT is contageous, and students feed off of one another's enthusiasm. I love teaching our students, because there is often a childlike giddyness over learning. Those
wow, I get it! moments are great for both the class and the teacher. I love that students are willing to share that excitement.
We have not invested any money in traditional advertising (school newpapers, etc...) in nearly ten years, so every student we get is based strictly on a recommendation of a friend. This fills our class with great people. Our goal is to provide a personal, intense course where we know everyone's name and over the duration of the course, we learn the nuances of each student. If we do this well, then students tell their friends and there's no better advertising than that. It continually fills the class with the nicer, more committed students.
As a point of interest, we've been doing MCAT preparation longer than Princeton Review. The company they bought in the mid-90s to improve their program (Hyperlearning) was developed primarily by one of the founders of Berkeley Review. So in the strictest sense of a timeline, BR is more developed than PR. We just fly under the radar, because as atypical as this may sound, we are perfectly happy being a small company. We love what we do and balance that fine line of staying in business with over-expanding and losing the quality. The one time we expanded up to five centers, we lost that feel. We immediately dropped the fifth center at the request of our teachers who didn't enjoy the excessive commuting. Over time, we dropped our UC Davis site and opted to stay at three locations since.
Please let me know what you mean by developed, and I'll see if I can answer your questions. Perhaps you mean CBTs, books, etc... If that's the case, I think all three courses are well developed (all of us get mostly positive feedback here), but we each have a different philosophy behind our teaching, materials, test difficulty, answer explanations, and strategies.
