Thanks for the great advice everyone. Unfortunately, cost is a big issue for me. I'm putting myself through college.
I'm going to go with the UMKC MCAT prep course. It's a fraction of everyone else's course and I'm getting access to AAMC's MCAT Practice Online. Plus, I like that it's being taught by professors. I've heard too many horror stories about TA's teaching the Kaplan courses. I don't know if they're true, but I don't have enough money to gamble.
Thanks for putting up that link. I went ahead and looked at the course and there are some definite pros and cons, but the low cost is a big enough pro that you're making a good choice for your needs.
The
pros are that the
teachers should know their material quite well. If you dig deep at the school site, you'll be able to find teaching reviews, although those will be for their classroom course. You might want to do that before registering. Not that being a professor makes someone a good teacher, let alone a good MCAT teacher, but they'll know their material.
As far as commercial courses go, you are right about some courses at a few of their locations using undergraduate TAs to teach. Sometimes these people are excellent, but the horror stories of people having a teacher who took the same undergrad class as them the previous semester are common enough to believe they actually happen.
The biggest
con is that there are
only twelve hours of classtime, and it's on line. I'm not sure why it has to be a live feed, but I can't see people on the west coast getting up on a
Saturday morning at 7am to get on line to watch a three-hour class. Another con is that it
doesn't come with any study materials, and that's the most important part of a class, because you spend far more time reviewing and practicing than you do in lectures. You're probably going to spend another $300 on preparation materials. The final con to consider is that the
biology lecture, general chemistry lecture, and organic chemistry lecture are the EXACT SAME lectures as the DAT course (see the schedules on their website to verify this). They will not be teaching MCAT specific techniques and tricks. More so, because the MCAT is passage-based while the DAT is all free-standing questions, the class will likely only be a review. A major part of MCAT review is learning how to use the information to answer questions. Make sure you find a way to do that on your own, because that is critical to doing well.
To get the most out of this class, you'll need to be highly disciplined and have a good set of review materials to study on your own. As far as materials go, SDN is probably the very best resource for getting a good answer to the materials question. To get a feel for what the summaries and polls at SDN have said over the past year, check out
this thread.
The other downside is that if you have any questions, you'll need to find somewhere to ask them. Getting a tutor gets expensive, so you should take advantage of the Q and A forum here during your review. People like Isoprop and SN2ed provide some great insights and solutions.
Best of luck. Your feedback about the course would be greatly appreciated. If it's a useful option, then perhaps others will want to do it. If it ends up being another gimmick, like Stewart University for instance, then that will be good to know too.
My gut feeling is that the 12-hour course that finishes in three weeks and covers both the DAT and MCAT won't be that helpful, because that's hardly enough time to review the subject matter, let alone learn how to take the exam. A big part of reviewing is learning how to attack passages and questions, and that takes time spread over a few months. You have to have a class, then practice, and then have another class. That sequence makes the second class more useful than the first. It's a buildup process. You should start reviewing asap, so that you'll get the most out of those lectures.
