Prep classes

[lawyergirl]

I was wondering if anyone could tell if taking a prep course is even a good idea considering it costs a lot of money.

any suggestions would be really helpful:)

 

thanks

[janny_jan]

It depends on each person. The prep courses are lecture style and very structured. If you don't learn well by listening to lectures, then I wouldn't bother and just go with the textbooks/practice tests. The structured style is nice if you have trouble motivating yourself to study (like me!). I took the Princeton review course and while it was an insane amount of work, the teachers were fantastic (Ph.D in english lit for VR/WS..pretty amazing) and I learned a lot.

Again, totally up to the person and study style.

[nosuperman]

I took the PR course a few years back and I didn't find that it helped all that much. The quality of the instruction-component depends entirely on the teacher you get, and its pretty easy to get a job teaching for PR - My friends and I were all offered positions teaching based on our scores, with not much thought given to our teaching abilities. Your instructor will surely have the ability to get themselves a high MCAT score, their ability to convey those skills and that understanding to a class of students from many different academic levels is another story.

 

Towards the end of the course I started skipping lectures because I was pulling ahead of the class study-wise and wanted to keep working on the things I felt I was weak in, as opposed to having to be on par with everyone else in the course. I felt I could jam more into my day if I just stayed at the library and studied as opposed to traveling out to the class and spending time learning stuff that I either already knew or stuff that I could learn at my own pace more easily.

 

Its notable that I generally learn more from sitting down with a book and figuring something out on my own as opposed to sitting in a classroom listening to someone cover the same topics and key points that are found in said book. If you aren't motivated to study daily on your own, however, a course would probably help you stay on track.

 

For what its worth, after the PR course I received a 31R. I re-wrote 3 years later using some old Kaplan books and some ExamKrackers materials and received a 34R (12B, 11, 11)