Princeton Review's Mcat Prep classes

[Drrrrrr. Celty]

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Do any of you have any experience with either the classroom or small group instructions offered by Princeton? Would you recommend them? Do you feel like they helped? Or do you feel like it was a waste of money?

 

[pfaction]

1. Are you class of 2013?
2. Here are some stuff of my own personal opinion of TPR concerning their in-class stuff: http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showpost.php?p=12584640&postcount=357
3. My email to my instructors:
   In either case, I also wanted to comment on TPR's representation of this MCAT:
   
   For PS, TPR is way too simple/easy, bluntly put. The ICC is somewhat representative of the MCAT, in terms of difficulty. I found my exam to be harder than any of the AAMC practice exams, if I had to choose, AAMC 10 and definitely 11 were the closest to the actual test. They asked ridiculous questions. The free standing questions required specific knowledge of the most random things imaginable. The questions themselves seemed to be a bit more passage based, but if you didn't understand the basics, the passage was a foreign language. In that sense, TPR filled 30% of the gap for Physics and General Chem. TPR is just too easy. I actually actually followed a series known as The Berkley Review (TBR) during the last month and worked through their book and passages, which helped me fill another 50% of the gap because TBR is simultaneously harder and more in depth for PS than TPR. On the exam, there were questions where I had no idea how to even approach. General consensus between me, Shawn, and other people was that the test was ridiculously calculation heavy.
   
   
   Verbal is my weakest point, no real need to comment here. TPR was adequate, AAMC verbal also helped.
   
   
   For Biological Sciences, I can't really comment. I barely studied, instead I applied the pharmacotherapeutical and pathophysiological principles I learned in school and worked backwards--that's generally what the BS section is anyways, a distortion of physiology and how to solve it. BS is obviously my strong point; so I found it to be moderately easy. We had more Organic Chemistry than I was expecting, with some weird questions, but overall TPR prepared me for the microbiological components quite well.
   
   
   
   If I had to give advice to pass on to the next students, forget the AAMC's outside of 9, 10, and 11. AAMC 3-8 were a joke; I routinely ended 10+ minutes in each section, and finished all of BS in 35 minutes, to get scores of 33+. They stressed outside knowledge more than passage inference. For future students, its not enough to know just the basics anymore, you must have a concrete understanding of each and every part of an equation, conversion from unit to unit and exponents within four seconds, and being able to skip questions if you don't know it in 30 seconds. Please go over unit conversions, exponents and logs or give a lot of practice problems. There was one question that took me a full three minutes even with shortcuts because of the exponents and unit conversion. For BS, the ICC and Advanced Passages were decent enough to go by. We had easy physiology as I recall, and only the Organic questions really stumped me, as the 13 indicates.
   
4. Similarly spread around SDN.

 

[Drrrrrr. Celty]

It seems like the TPR did help though. And PS seems like it will be my worst section, I honestly had a physics professor that made things easier and use different letters for equations. So generally maybe it's because translational motion of TBR was just too much of a shock to me, but I don't know, maybe I'll get used to it.