TesTeachers

I was referred to TesTeachers in Colorado for my life and Accident/​Health insurance prep. Holy moly, was the lecture course ineffectual. I found it not only unhelpful, but misrepresentative of what was actually on the licensing test! The teachers claim to want to teach you what you need to know to pass the test, but can go off on tangents based on their own experiences. Their supplements are helpful, but trust me, you can get supplements other places and study them for HOURS like I thankfully did in order to pass. Don’t expect the class (Lakewood, CO only) to assist you in actually passing the test. The teachers will actually lead you to believe that the licensing test is easy and not much is required to pass. Believe me when I say you should look for a program that is honest and forthright and assists with more aspects focused on COMPREHENSION rather than MEMORIZATION. Avoid like the plague, I lost over $ 150 and will not be recommending to anyone I know.

Update: 2015-​08-​22 Well, passed my exam and I would say that the materials provided by TesTeachers are complete and informative. I also did not experience an outtage again, so I’m bumping them up to 3 stars. Haven’t heard that they’ve done anything to permanently mitigate the outtages, but if I do, they get another star or two from me as they have a complete package otherwise.
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Update: 2015-​12 This is a little delayed, but I was contacted directly by TesTeachers and they apologized for the outage and assured me that they do have backup systems but on occasion, even with backups, they’ve encountered short term outages in the past. They also offered me a highly discounted rate if I chose to do further training through them in the future. Changing my recommendation to 5 stars even though I will probably not need further training, simply in view of their good service and follow up.
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Original Review:
Training for Insurance license. The company I’m with recommends this online provider, so here I am. The content is good, users can also download and review material offline which is nice.
The reason that it’s not 4 or 5 stars is because they don’t seem to have a reliable server that they host their online software on. Trying to logon today and their website is «not found?!!» Spoke with customer service and their systems are also down. Seriously? There is a California-​mandated timer on their website that makes sure that you’re active and logs your time. You can’t pass until you’ve been active on the site for the set amount of time. So, anyone trying to study and get time credited is out of luck until their servers are back up as there is no way to manually credit you study time either. I understand that this is partially the fault of the State of California and their silly rules, but as a serious service provider being paid serious $, there is really little excuse these days to be down for an hour or more (in the middle of the day), unless your cloud infrastructure is being hosted in someone’s garage.
TesTeachers, do us all a favor and use AWS or another serious, redundant backend please. Downtime in the middle of the day is no longer excusable when there are so many options for redundancy. Our time is valuable, please respect your customers by not wasting it. Let me know that you’ve taken steps to mitigate this issue and I will gladly raise my rating to a 4 or 5.
Fellow Unilocalers, before forking over your money, ask a company about their outtages and if they’re doing anything to mitigate them. Don’t get stuck with a company that will drop offline when you need them.

Scheduled a life and health class in Illinois and after waiting for over an hour for the teacher to arrive another student informed the class that the last teacher came late too … 3hrs late! Who is willing to wait 3hrs without being certain that this «teacher» will be here? The hotel staff knows nothing, testeachers in Arizona is sleeping, this is totally unprofessional and a complete waste of time. I rather pay the extra $ 40 and schedule with preptraining group.

So my new job requires an Insurance Brokers License so I had to sign up for the class here. It was a 2-​day class taught by a VERY nice and experienced agent, Peter. He took plenty of time to make sure everything was understood and tried his best to make things interesting… but let’s be honest, learning the inner workings of insurance is dry to say the least.
They provided plenty of learning materials offered as much assistant as is possible. For what it was the class was great and very informative. Highly recommended.
The reason for the 4 stars instead of 5? They only offer uncovered parking so my car was essentially an oven every time I left.