I don't know. I'm glad I'm taking a class, it's helping me stay accountable and having a set meeting schedule makes it easier for me to actually get away from the family. So it's better than nothing, I guess.
On the downside:
- There's not that face-to-face interaction with the instructor and there's less motivation/accountability.
- There's no visual feedback (ie, furrowed brows) for the instructor as to whether people "get it" or not, and nobody wants to "raise their hand" in a 40-person pre-med class to say they don't understand something.
- It's hard to get across the gist of a science question while typing in an instant-message type format.
- The people in the class are nice enough, but there's not a lot of interaction.
There are occasionally audio lags but I've not had anything major or even annoying. There's no video, it's more like a real-time voice-over powerpoint with real-time drawing tools.
As far as value... The way I see it, the class is about the same price as one 4 credit university course and you cover as much or more material. The instructors have all been very knowledgeable. It's a ****-ton of money to pay for prep, but for what it is I guess it's done it's job. You also have to consider that you get all the AAMC CBTs and a bunch (7? 10?) of FL PR CBTs, including something like 5 sets of graded essays. You get the entire PR book set. If you go to every class and do the homework you have the option of repeating the course. And every lecture is recorded so you can go back and re-play the .ppts. HOWEVER, I do feel a little ripped off by the 40-person class size and losing some of the time and interaction with the instructors.
I thought that the content review would be really valuable for me because it's been 9-10 years since the first 2/3 of my prereqs and when I first looked at the practice questions I was sort of in shock (WTF are they talking about!?!?). Turns out that it was mostly either stuff I already had internalized or stuff that I wasn't going to understand anyway with a review-level intensity of teaching. I can't say if I'd choose the same option again. The "sacred time" the class gives me is really valuable, but at the same time I think there are better things I could have been doing with that time (ie, doing lots and lots and lots of practice questions and passages).
