The Princeton Review

This review is about how the Princeton Review office ignored sexual harassment from a Princeton Review Instructor, as well as the poor teaching quality in Verbal and Biology.
This review is for the MCAT prep class at the Palo Alto location. I took MCAT classes here, and it was a horrible experience.
When I took the class, the Verbal section teacher for my class was male. He was extremely unprofessional and tried to hit on me during class and after. Since he had access to my personal email account through my registration for the MCAT class, he started to gchat me and try to hit on me. It was extremely unprofessional and was sexual harrassment. When he figured out who I hung out with in the class, he tried to hang out with them, and I started to feel scared. I still had a lot of class left at the time for the MCAT class, and needed to work on my Verbal section, but I was worried about going to him for help so I just studied on my own. He sent me emails asking me why I didn’t go to office hours, but really I was to scared to show up for office hours.
Because the Verbal instructor kept pestering me and made the learning experience hard, I actually talked to the Princeton Review Office about it, but they did nothing about it. I am deeply disappointed that a large company like Princeton Review did absolutely nothing about sexual harassment that was going on through their class.
Even after I finished the classes, the Verbal instructor kept emailing me an the emails got stranger and stranger. He sent me long articles he wrote about marriage and what he thinks makes a good life, and what a Christian wife should do. He continued to try to gchat me when I was on gchat.
When he gchated me he kept talking about how I shouldn’t be pursuing education, and how to be a good woman and wife I should be basically staying at home. I found this extremely degrading. After all the harassment in class and after class, and seeing that Princeton Review did nothing, I decided to stop going on my gchat altogether and have his emails sent to a junk mail folder.
I thought this would be the end but then he found me on facebook, at which point I had to then block him on Facebook.
I was doing pretty bad on Verbal when I started the class, and because I could not seek help from the instructor, I actually purchased the Examcracker’s series and self-​taught myself the Verbal section. All my score improvements came from my own practice and had little to do with that class, and if anything my experiences with the harassing instructor hurt my improvement. Thankfully i did fine on the actual MCAT Verbal because I studied hard for it on my own.
Outside the Verbal section, the biology instructor was also very unsatisfactory. I am a biology major and was in college studying biology when I took the MCAT class. I felt like I knew more than the Biology section instructor of Princeton Review, who had actually just graduated from Berkeley’s biology undergraduate program. He hadn’t taken much more biology classes than I did at the time, and it really showed because he would often now know how to explain things. I can’t say I really learned anything about biology through Princeton Review, because the only useful part were the practice problems that come in the book they give you. The class itself was useless in preparing me for the biology section.
Only two teachers I had actually knew what they were doing. One was Felicia Tam, who taught the physics section. She’s a wonderful teacher, and when asking her questions, I never felt like she was flustered or didn’t know. The other teacher was the chemistry teacher. I forget his name now, but he was also pretty good at teaching.
I would never go back to Princeton Review to take any kind of prep classes.

Unilocal likes to remove good reviews so don’t trust what you read on here completely. There was an awesome student review posted at the beginning of the month that was removed by Unilocal a couple weeks later. Don’t trust a company like Unilocal that picks and chooses what reviews they want to keep on their members’ sites!

They finally gave me a 500 dollar refund.
Now they «mistakenly» send a collection agency for me.
Seriously, unless you want to work with a dishonest and subpar company, pick another preparatory class.

About a month and a half ago on a Saturday, I took a free SAT practice test at the Palo Alto office. As I was pleased with what I saw on their website, I wanted to see what my performance level was before choosing a course. After the test, I was informed that I would see the results in my email by the following Monday. I waited about a week for my results before I started calling the office. Each time I received apologies, excuses, and promises that I would see my score ‘soon’, but no results. I question the validity of the excuses. During the span of a month and a half, I have been told that a computer had broken down, that my data was misplaced, and that the system itself was down. I was even informed that my score was delayed because I was listed under the wrong mailing address, even though the scores were to be sent to my email address. Either Princeton Review’s program is faulty, or they just do not care to address their customer’s needs. Ten calls later, I have still not received my score. Princeton Review’s website boldly declares «Buy with confidence», but if this is how Princeton Review treats its prospective students, if this is representative of the attitude and service students can expect, then I recommend that high-​achievers seek test prep options elsewhere.

Mixed thoughts. I took the MCAT class at the Cupertino center over the summer. Each of the MCAT subjects are taught by a separate teacher, which is great because you would get a teacher who is an expert in each of his/​her respective section, right? Wrong. Some of the teachers were unhelpful and confusing. I wonder how the PR picks its teachers because some of these teachers cannot teach AT ALL.
I do like the curriculum though. It’s intense and it will make you work so hard that you will dream about organic chemistry mechanisms and verbal passages. Even though I am not satisfied with my score and I will retake the exam, I know that my score would have been a lot worse if I didn’t take this course.
The resources that the course gives you are so valuable. You get all of the practice AAMC exams and a bunch of Princeton Review exams. All of which are online so you get good practice of the test format. The review books are also very thorough and well written. They also give you a FATTTTTT book of practice passages. When I say FATTTT, I mean 2 – 3 inches of MCAT-​passages-​fat. I think the resources are worth the price of the course (~$ 1700).
The administration is very helpful. They address all of your questions and concerns very quickly and thoroughly. After deciding to retake the exam, I requested to retake the course for free (it’s a part of your guarantee that if you are unsatisfied with your score, you can retake the course) and within one day, I was enrolled in the course of my choice.
Now, the location of the actual place. Like I said, I took my class at the Cupertino classroom. The location is good, right off of the 85, so it’s an easy drive. However, the parking lot could get very cramped. There are a whole mess of tutoring centers in this plaza, so there are kids and parents everywhere. It really depends on the time that you go. It could either be really crowded or completely empty. The classrooms are NOT VERY NICE. Some of the rooms have NO windows and the ones that actually do only have windows that are probably 1 foot wide. My classmates and I actually had this joke that one of the rooms had dimensions of a coffin. Some of the rooms could get really warm and stuffy too, which was extremely annoying since my class was in the summer from 1:00 — 3:30.
The 3 stars are for the excellent resources, but I had to take 2 stars off because I felt like two out of my five teachers were not very helpful and also for the Cupertino classrooms’ bad facilities!

These people cancelled on me just a week before my mcat class was supposed to start. leaving me stranded with other companys’ classes being full. They didnt even offer some sort of remedy for the extreme inconvenience and anxiety theyve caused. they run this place like a true business with no sense of morality for students and their educational goals.

SAT Subject Test course was good. However, we were disappointed because when we registered we were told that there is a «guarantee: — if the student is not satisfied with his test score, he is entitled to do a refresher course. When we called to request a refresher, we were told that this guarantee is only applicable for SAT, not Subject SAT.
This is indicative of lack of good business practice — in fact downright misleading. We have since then found many other excellent tutoring courses that may not have the «elite» name in their title, but more professional and equally good content. I would urge you to explore other options.

Unfortunately I had a very poor experience with Princeton Review. My course tutor was fine, but the office staff was unbelievably rude and unresponsive. I was a model student — did all homework attended scheduled tutoring sessions and on all my practice exams I was only scoring 30 points higher than the first exam I had taken. The rule at pr is that you must take an exam within 30 days of completely the course. I called numerous times to talk to the office and meanwhile postponed my exam 3 times, only when I threatened to right a poor review did they start calling me back. By that time I had passed the «expiration date» to take the exam I had paid $ 1300 for and the office was unwilling to consider any of my evidence of messages and email attempts to contact them and make other arrangements t retake the course. Frankly don’t bother, my friends that went through Veritas have had much better experiences.

I took The Princeton Review to help me prepare for the April 2006 Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), and overall I was pleased with my progress. I ended up improving by 5 points on each of the science sections, but unforunately had no improvement on the verbal section. They have separate instructors for each of the sciences covered; Physics, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Biology. The course materials are thorough, and my instructors were generally good. The steep $ 1600 course fee is well worth it if you are willing to put in the time and effort.