Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions

A Rant
By Michelle K.
After a lot of research, I decided to go with a Kaplan course to help me prep for my big bad GMAT. The good news is that I improved 70 points in 3 months, but I attribute most of that to me working my butt off, and not to my instructor or their «proprietary» materials. I did get $ 100 off for attending one of their free information classes and signing up for the course right there, so definitely look for a deal like that if you decide to go with Kaplan. If you’re taking a test soon, do your research too and consider my experience… with a grain of salt.
I had many issues with Kaplan from the get go. The Boston center director put me in my second choice class in downtown Boston, even though I later found out that my first choice class was not full by any means. I found this out because I had to call 1−800-Kaptest to settle a payment dispute: my transaction had apparently never occured in their records, so I had to have them charge my credit card a second time. Also, I didn’t get my package of materials for a few weeks, so someone told me that they had probably sent it to the center instead. I took a package from the center… and then a month into the course, a second package of materials came delivered to my apartment.
Then, because I had to «switch» into the class I had requested the weekend before it started, I did not have a student ID# for the first class meeting. Thus, my diagnostic test did not have an ID# on it, and this meant that I did not get my score onto the interactive website for a long, long time. I spoke to all of the Kaplan personnel, including the Cambridge center director, who was nice and tried her best, but made me think that it would never appear up in the My Scores section, even though there was a clear space for it. I accepted this reluctantly, but then a week later, a score appeared — just not mine. It had different Math and Verbal raw scores plus a different total score. I didn’t bother correcting this because the Kaplan employees were unhelpful up until that point and it would have been useless unless I wanted to take them up on their Higher Score Guarantee.
Also, my instructor (PM me if you want his particular name in order to avoid him) was a bad teacher. His pacing sucked. He answered too many off-​topic questions and took too many tangents, and then he had to rush the second half of each of our classes, leaving us with classwork for homework (in addition to the already very time-​consuming homework quizzes and practice tests). Every other sentence he would ask «Does anyone have any questions about that?» even though we were all adults and knew how to raise our hands in the case that we did. That just took up more of our expensive lesson time. On the last day of class, I found out that he was a Harvard UNDERgrad. And even though I thought my instructor was bad, a few people switched INTO my section from other Kaplan GMAT classes, saying that their instructors were even worse. The truth is that you only need a 680 out of 800 to teach for Kaplan, and I can say from experience that one’s testtaking abilities do not correlate 1 to 1 with teaching abilities.
That said, there were defifnite pluses to Kaplan. I got to take 10 practice tests… one of which was their Ultimate Practice Test. This is a great opportunity, and only for Kaplan students — a test at the testing center in actual test conditions! This allowed me to know what the cubicles felt like and the security measures and how to get more scrap paper and how cold it was in there and so on. I liked that all the homework was on computer, just like the actual exam, but the website was often a little finnicky.
One last piece of advice: Take a once-​a-​week course. You will still have more homework than anyone can ever finish, and you will have time to let the material sink in.
The End.