THE BERKELY REVIEW COURSE

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Pointers to take from this post....

They will not refund your $ if you decide to cancel the course, even if you do not use their services.

They do not respond to your emails when you have a question or concern

Their teachers for office hours cannot even answer MCAT questions accurately

Their teachers are not physicians or pre- medical students. They are random off the street hires.

They do not care about their customers nor your outcome on the MCAT

They DO CARE about making $$ money off of you! That I can guarantee!!
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That is shocking to hear. That has never been the appearance I got from that particular company. There representative on here, BerkReviewTeach has been nothing but amazing and extremely helpful. In fact, he/she has been more than willing to steer posters to other options if Berkeley Review is not the best.


Their teachers are not physicians or pre- medical students. They are random off the street hires.

My understanding is that, the course is dependent on the location--I believe that that is true for all the other companies. I believe that they say the location taught by the Physics/Chemistry book guy is the best. Even then, I always thought they did not expand nationally or to other States, because they were very selective of their instructors.

Again I am shock to hear of your experience. I think the company may be going through some restructuring or something. BerkReviewTeach maybe able to address more of your concerns.
 
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Eh, can't speak to the courses but their customer service when I bought books back in the day was fantastic and the books helped my self-study my way to a score in the high 90th percentile. Things change over time, so I can't speak to today but they generally were very invested in quality a few years ago
 
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When I took their course, I think all the instructors were pre-med and had taken the MCAT. The "core" teacher was one of the founders and book authors of the prep material.
 
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KatieNP said:
I had a horrific experience with THE BERKELY REVIEW COURSE- "TBR". The company is extremely *UNETHICAL* and they treat their customers like $$$, not valued people. DO NOT waste your time, energy or money on this course. Guaranteed to disappoint!!!

Pointers to take from this post....

They will not refund your $ if you decide to cancel the course, even if you do not use their services.

They do not respond to your emails when you have a question or concern

Their teachers for office hours cannot even answer MCAT questions accurately

Their teachers are not physicians or pre- medical students. They are random off the street hires.

They do not care about their customers nor your outcome on the MCAT

They DO CARE about making $$ money off of you! That I can guarantee!!
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I want to say that I will do my very best to be objective, but I do want to point out one issue at the start before responding. To say they won't refund your money if you don't use their services and then to talk about the quality of your experience in office hours contradicts the statement about "not using the service." But that aside, I hope I can partially address this.

First off, it is touching that people who had good experiences stepped up and spoke out. That means a lot. Up to and including Summer 2021, I would stand by the course 100% and say that they (we) made every effort to help every student as much as possible. The staff was superb with Dr. Chris Lindshield (actual physician who taught CARS), Cecile Santos (college professor with 21 years experience), Todd Bennett (company founder and author of the chemistry and physics books), Justin Pham (medical student), Spenser Kaplan (soon to be medical student), and Rachel Colbath (medical student). But, at the end of that Summer, all but Spenser stopped teaching for Berkeley Review. Todd stopped running the course and turned in over to Josh, a son of the other founder.

Josh put his own touches on the course by setting up a class portal, hiring a new staff (including inserting himself as a teacher), and setting the schedule. There were members of the teaching team that lacked experience, but I feel "random off the street" is a bit of a stretch. But in all fairness, the feedback from students in the Fall 2021 course was not positive. I assume this is the primary reason why Berkeley Review stopped offering a lecture course. It would be best if students from the Fall 2021 course could comment, because they would be able to address this better than I can.

I will confirm that there is no longer a Berkeley Review MCAT review course of any kind, online or in person. I believe this information was shared in another post. They no longer have any classrooms or physical locations, so it would seem that they will not be coming back. The company number (800) MCAT-TBR has been disconnected.

I am genuinely sorry you had the terrible experience you must have had to write this. That sort of experience would never have happened in the past.
 
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flightjordan said:
@BerkReviewTeach Sad to hear its gone. I thought it was a pretty good course (I was pre Fall 2021). Will the books still be updated? Can you link the other post?
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It was inevitable the way the company was trending. It's a bummer it went south so fast at the end. When a company revolves around one person, that's the risk.

I'm not sure if the books will be updated, but given that there is no course revenue and the book sales are small, I don't know if there is a budget to do it. With the original owners gone (one passed away and the other walked away from daily operations and teaching last Summer), there is only one person running the show and I do not believe he has the qualifications to upgrade books. But who knows?
 
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KatieNP said:
Todd is no longer the owner- this is when things went downhill. So sad.
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I took the course for my repeat and it was really good. Todd was the best, but there were other really good teachers too. This seems awfully fast to go from great to garbage. There must be more to the story here.
 
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PlsLetMeIn21 said:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I took the course for my repeat and it was really good. Todd was the best, but there were other really good teachers too. This seems awfully fast to go from great to garbage. There must be more to the story here.
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There's not much more to the story. Management changed and the great teachers left. The best thing BR had going was excellent, caring teachers. They left and the course folded shortly after.
 
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No! Not their whole set at least.

Their CARS and P/S books were never worth it. They don't have any sociology and the psych part is not close to what the MCAT asks. I'm not sure how many passages my psych book had, but it was probably no more than ten to fifteen in the entire book. And they suck too; complete waste of time. I made the mistake of starting out with it my first time and that wasted many study hours. I thought their CARS packets from the actual class were amazing, but their book is literally the worst book out there. You're wasting money if you buy their CARS or P/S books.

I personally thought their biology was over the top in terms of details and they didn't have any passages based on experiments, which is what you need most for the B/B section. There are plenty of better resources for biology than TBR. It's not that TBR is bad, it's just that they cover extraneous material in excessive detail, especially in molecular biology. Also, their typos in the answer key were super annoying.

Where they shined for me was chemistry and physics. If you're weak in C/P, they can help. I had some pretty old TBR books that were really similar to what they passed out as their latest version. I don't think they've updated any of their books since before the MCAT changed in 2015. Despite this, they had good chemistry questions and I loved their explanations.

If I were studying now, I'd buy only the chem books and I'd definitely buy them used. DO NOT GET THEM NEW. Ordering books was a pain and it took way longer than it should have. I seem to recall it being super expensive shipping too. I think I paid like $100 for the physics books and they were poorly packaged and kind of beat up when I got them. I'd definitely recommend getting used TBR chem books, and anything from the last ten years is fine. Focus on their passages. The reading portion can drag on and all of the useful tricks are also in their answer explanations.

If you have any questions, PM me.
 
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Wow, kind of a harsh review. But I can't say it wasn't honest. I'd lose all credibility if I didn't agree that the vast majority of people posting here say the same things. The PS and CARS books have always received harsh and unfavorable reviews. The biology books have been called convoluted, verbose, excessively detailed, unrealistically difficult, etc... many times. But for some people, that has been what they liked. Less than a quarter of a percent of the people studying for the MCAT used BR books besides chem and physics in 2022, so that corroborates your comments.

The comment about the chemistry and physics books not changing since before 2015 is tough to read. I want to disagree, but the truth is that the text portion is basically what Todd wrote back in 1990, before BR even existed. Passages have been modified and updated here and there, but even some of the 'new' passages were modifications of passages from his original work that had not appeared in the books before. Many people still find the CP passages useful.

I'm not sure if you said it or someone else, but you are right that the books were written by the people who taught the classes. Dale wrote the biology books and taught biology in Berkeley. Todd wrote all of the organic and general chemistry books (every single word) and most of the physics books, and he taught those classes. Whether like someone said, "the books are only useful if you have the author as your teacher," I don't know. Given that the classes are done and not coming back. and that those two will not be writing materials, maybe you have a point that the books are obsolete. I'd like to think the chem and physics passages are still helpful, but will admit that having the authors there to explain the passages and questions was critical, and without that, a lot is lost. Book sales have dwindled, which is probably because there are PDFs for everything (every company suffers this) and there is no more class to keep the name afloat.

I'm sorry about your ordering experience. Depending on the timing of when your order arrives, it could take a few days to fill and then there is shipping time. I don't think it takes longer than two weeks for anywhere in the continental US. As for boxing and shipping damage, that was an issue for a while when the books changed and basically outgrew the shipping boxes. The worst part is that only the chem and physics books grew, but it was enough to be an issue. I'm sorry you were caught in that era. They were good about shipping out a second set of books when that happened.
 
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I received a message that inspired me to follow up on this thread. When I mentioned that Dale wrote the biology book, I should have included that he also went by the name Elliot. It wasn't two people writing the biology materials; it was one person who used two names. He had a few people writing passages for his biology books, but he had the final say in what got printed.
 
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Wait so I'm preparing for the MCAT 2025/2026. Are the books still good to read and study? I was planning on making them my main source of content review/learning. I am reading a lot of comments about the books not being updated specifically the Biology one. Will this be a problem in my content review phase?
 
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