I wasn't going to add anything to this post because I figured someone else out there would have for me. However, I can see that that hasn't happened.
I took Kaplan and I was very impressed with it. I cannot say though that is was better than TPR simply because my experience limits me to Kaplan.
You DO get what you put into it. In my case, I put my whole heart into it while working full-time in lab internship AND going through my first 2 months of marriage.
The books are tremendous and some of the questions on the real MCAT seemed to come right out of our books. I enjoyed the classes because they paced me. You may THINK you KNOW EVERYTHING about half-reactions until the instructor throws a curve ball at you. You must know this stuff inside out. If you simply read the books on your own you may gloss over some material that you THINK you already know. . .only to find out later you were wrong.
The practice MCATs at Kaplan are murder and they discouraged me from the start. The instructors told us that they are made to be more difficult than the real MCAT. They weren't kidding. The real MCAT was "fairly" easy (verbal reasoning is always the exception
) for me. As a matter of fact, I never scored above a 26 on the Kaplan MCATs but got a 32 on the real one.
Now, keep in mind, this is how it worked for me. Someone earlier said that the courses are for joe-procrasinator, well in that case, just call me Joe. One must be honest with themselves when it comes to medical school process. You MUST know and identify your weaknesses early. Very few people are perfect students and the sooner you learn what works best for you the better you will be at succeding. cm7b5 knows he/she is not a procrastinator so her/his judgement is accurate on this subject. For myself, I needed the course and it helped.
That's my $0.83