Making a Thousand-Dollar Mistake

A student recently sent me an email that included the following:

Thanks again for your help. I took the LSAT twice (with a two-year stint in the Peace Corps somewhere in between). The first time I prepared with a Kaplan course. The second time I took a Testmasters course and used some Powerscore materials to prepare for the test. In the end, I thought Kaplan was a complete waste of time–Testmasters was definitely better, although the sheer volume of practice questions was a bit overwhelming. In the end, I canceled my score and then realized (finally) that my dream to become an attorney had been misguided. :-)

So I can definitely see the benefit (and necessity!) of a product like yours. I definitely have some scarring from my previous test prep experiences, so I’m hoping to attack the GMAT with a much more Zen-like approach. We’ll see how that goes…

This email points out a problem with traditional test-prep that we often overlook. Let’s assume that the student in question used the least intensive Kaplan and Testmasters courses available. We’re still looking at over $800 and dozens of hours down the drain.

You see, many traditional test-prep providers justify the ridiculous time and money they require from you by getting you to think of test-prep as a necessary part of the educational process. If you’ll spend well over $100,000 to go to four years of college and then attend an elite grad school program for a few years, what’s an extra grand and a couple months more to study for the test?

But the problem is that you might decide you don’t want to apply to a particular program after all. Or you might decide you still want to apply to that program, but you don’t want to go to all 100 hours of your prep class. Or whatever. And if you make any kind of decision like that with a traditional prep class, you could be in big trouble. You can’t get your money back, and you almost certainly can’t get individual time with the instructor to make up the material you missed.

Just one more thing to think about when you’re picking a test prep option.