The Princeton Review

I had Denise Pollard for a tutor for the small class and she was awesome! I highly recommend taking this course. Although it is a bit pricey it is very beneficial. Prior to taking the course I had struggled with how I would raise my scores but after taking the course I went from a 23 to a 27 overall. Denise is very flexible with her time and very attentive to your questions to do better on the test.

My daughter took this course for the ACT and had a great experience. She came out of this course feeling much more confident and prepared than she had before. Her teacher was Denise who she said made the class! She truly wanted the students to do their best! Overall, was worth the money and I highly recommend.

Anne Bader is a wonderful tutor who I highly recommend. She took the time to get to know my sons strengths and weaknesses and devised a plan suited for him. She gave him confidence and taught him skills to increase his score. Originally, my son was signed up for a group class but it was cancelled because there weren’t enough people. PR worked with us to devise a plan to include private tutoring and access to the homework club for the same price. Overall, I think this actually worked better for him. Thank you Anne for your expertise and help!

I thighly recommend against enrolling at the Princeton Review. The primary reason I signed up with them over Kaplan was because they offered a 10 point increase in your MCAT score or your money back. They test you the at the very beginning of the course, before you have reviewed any content. This catches people off guard, and they typically score pretty low. Personal I got a 22 on their test. I scored a 29 on the actual MCAT, and TPR refused to refund the $ 2000 I spent on their course.
If you really want to do well on the test, I recommend studying on your own. Each review company provides review materials for every subject, and each company has a subject they are best at. I’d recommend visiting The Student Doctor Network forums to find the current recommendations on what books to get. You are looking at spending $ 200 to get the best review material and a bunch of practice exams. I was able to get a 34 this way, and it is a fractional of the price of The Princeton Review

Anish Thakkar privately tutored me for the GRE and did an amazing job! I only took two sessions and he was able to teach me so much. He is also very personable and entertaining. I am feeling much more confident about my test He makes learning easy and enjoyable and I highly recommend him. I am feeling much more ready for my test.

I am currently taking Princeton Review’s GRE prep class with Anish, and he has been extremely helpful! Anish is great at making concepts easy to understand, and making the class as entertaining as possible (which I really appreciate since the material kinda sucks)

Thoroughly, Anish Thakkar taught the GRE small group class with tremendous flexibility, entertainment, and excellence. He made the class fun and personal. Not to mention the strategies he used to help the entire class remember triggers and formulas. I passed my GRE yesterday surpassing my graduate school’s requirements. In fact, my scores jumped up nearly 20 points from my initial pre-​test to test day. Even though my final score wasn’t as high, it still fulfilled 10 points above. I haven’t taken a math course in 5+ years so this was a huge advantage. Additionally, Anish took time of out of his day to study with me one-​on-​one since an emergency came up during one of our class times. Highly recommended to anyone seeking leverage on the GRE test!

Horrible. Scott Kampe, the PR office director, does not honor national policies concerning online and course extensions. They do not vet their instructors very well, so it’s hit or miss as to whether you’ll get someone who can help you succeed. I’m sure they’ll say, «Well, that person must of scored poorly on their test.» Not the case, I did well, but PR did not help me get there. The only helpful PR product is the online portal, but Kaplan has an online portal as well. I HIGHLY recommend KAPLAN over PR any day. Don’t waste your money here. They’re the kind of people that smile at you until they get paid, and then you’re worthless to them.

I took the gre small group class. I would say that it was pretty effective at keeping me on a strict study schedule and in helping work out tough problems. There are plenty of useful questions for practice as well as an abundance of tests. I liked that they graded the writing practice sections as well and have helpful tips. My instructor Anish Thakkar was excellent and kept the class interesting! My score has improved since the beginning by several points!

I took a GRE prep course at the la jolla campus and it was fantastic! The instructor, Anish T. was extremely thorough and detailed in his explanations. It had been 15 years since I had seen some of the math and Anish spent extra time with me to make sure I had all the formulas and rules down. I can not recommend Princeton Review enough!

First, let me express my sincere gratitude to Clarissa Constantine for her individualized attention to my son’s needs. He is a gifted student, which she recognized, and therefore focused her efforts with him on polishing his test taking skills. With just 3 hours of personal tutoring, which is a very reasonable investment of time and money, his practice ACT scores rose to his goal level. He ended up in the 99+%, with three of the four sections a perfect 36. Because he was enrolled (even in private tutoring), he had access to workbooks, practice tests and scoring summaries.
Now, the downside. My son was initially signed up for a group class which was canceled. The website (run by the national PR), is very buggy and difficult. Even my hubby, with a CS degree from Cal, couldn’t figure it out. I had to call for help A LOT. Zach took my calls, helped me out, organized the tutoring, and ended up saving me a lot of money. But, it was not without some pain and frustration.
In the end, my son made his goal score, I saved money over the group class fee, and my son had access to all the tools he needed for self study. However, the benefits of those 3 private tutoring hours were tremendous. I highly recommend this individualized approach, which both allowed him to have free time to be a kid and reach his lofty ACT goals.

I signed up for the GRE prep course completely unaware of what to expect of the test and prep, and on the first day, I realized I hadn’t done any of this math for 10+ years. To my relief, my instructor, the amazing, one and only Anish Thakkar, taught me everything I need to know. He is so patient, fun to work with, and very intelligent. I have no doubt that I will score at least 10 points higher on my actual exam. I can’t speak for the other instructors, but Anish rocks!

These people are very nice on the phone. I just signed up for this course for this summer at the La Jolla location. I really hope it helps improve the SAT score. I will report back but so far they have been great!

I had a great experience with this program. I was studying to take the GMAT which is the exam to take to get into an MBA program. I had never taken a business class and didn’t even know what the GMAT was until a couple weeks before I signed up for the class. I went from a 470 on my first practice test to a 640 when I took the actual test. The books were great but they wouldn’t have been as helpful without the teacher there to explain all of the tricks and strategies. I had Jake as my teacher and he was amazing. He is not only incredibly knowledgeable about all of the content on the test, he also knows exactly how to explain it to people who don’t understand it as well as he does. He was always there and eager to help and answer any questions you may have. I highly recommend this class.

Princeton Review,
Thanks for the awesome GRE Essentials course in La Jolla. The class was only 5 people and the instructors were extremely receptive to individual questions. I was truly impressed by the quality of instructors and the dedication they have to improving their students scores. I would recommend this course to anyone who is very busy but still needs some extra help with the GRE.

Oh Princeton review, how I loathe thee. I wish Unilocal existed when I was in grade/​high school because all the memories I repressed are coming back up so I knew wtf i was doing.
Lets just clarify some things: American higher education is based on none other than capitalistic bottom lines– money. Money for tests, application fees, and you guessed it, more money for «prep» courses to take these tests (that don’t exist in Oz, UK, or NZ by the way).
You’d think with such a competitive law school and med school system it would reflect on our great nation, but no. The new studies have been released: America ranks 23 out of 25 in the wealthiest nations’ test scores. In a plethora of surveys and tests of gradeschool children across the nation, we ranked the lowest in math, but the highest in confidence in how we did.
…Anywho… back to the review. My parents have always sworn by Princeton Review not by any form of credibility, but by name. I was forced to take their SAT classes multiple times as a little tyke (4^th grade) and finally in undergrad i took a couple of LSAT classes. Now my dear friend/​wife Sophia W. is taking GMAT classes. Oh how I don’t miss grad school applications.
My Unilocal prescription: OVERPRICED and ineffectual! Two grand is ridiculous. I know in some locations like LA they have personal tutors come to your house for like SAT’s or something, but thats like 4 grand. wtf?! I wish I knew about Kaplan when before I took Princeton Review. Princeton Review doesn’t have lawyers working for them to guide students through app processes! They don’t guarantee classes either. You have to PAY again if you want to retake the class. You have to rebuy the books again. (unlike Veritas and Kaplan). They dont offer office hours. Their instructors — not even that good. I mean the whole Gmat, Lsat, or whatever SAT, …AT process is painful enough as it is. Charging a broke student that probably already has that invisible gun to his head that much money without a guarantee is robbery.

I had a much larger than expected class. There were 14 in mine. The quality of the teaching was great, but due to the large class size, I found that we were usually going over material that was not at my level. I rarely spoke or was called on to participate in class, even though I’m typically a pretty active student.
Overall, I’m glad I took the course, but I wonder if I wouldn’t have had a better experience at Kaplan. I bought a Kaplan book so that I could get access to more CATs. I’m struck by how much nicer their website is.

DO NOT GO TO THIS LOCATION!!!
I paid over $ 1000 for a GRE prep course and they completely messed everything up. They told me that 9 people were in the class, turned out to be 15. Also, a few of them were ridiculously… ungifted…and made the class unbearably slow for the rest of us.
First problem: They did not give me online access to the practice tests which was a guaranteed part of the course. I set aside 4 hours to complete them and then couldn’t get to the site! I contacted THREE phone numbers to try and get this resolved, and no one answered. I finally got a call back the next day and was granted access. However, I had no time and had to rush through the test, therefore getting a pretty low scores that was not reflective of my ability.
THEN it told me that I would have to pay an additional fee to get my essay graded. No thank you, I said, and skipped that part of the test. Turned out, essay grading was supposed to be included in the price of the course. All the other students got theirs graded and I just missed out and didn’t get that feedback. Called back again and they «fixed» the problem.
Then my instructor mysteriously didn’t get my score report on the 1^st test so she couldn’t go over my strengths and weaknesses with me. She told me that she would figure out what was going on and would go over it with me the next week. However, we were supposed to take the second test by the next class. How was I supposed to take the second test without getting feedback on the first? When the instructor finally went over my test with me, she decided to go over everyone’s SECOND scores before she went over my first score — I therefore had to wait until long after the class had ended to get my first score back… when everyone else already had their second. I fell so far behind that I didn’t take the next 3 progress tests.
When I complained about this, I was offered no sort of compensation. They did not fulfill their contractual obligations and the only thing I was told was that I could take the course again if I was disatisfied. Well, yes… because I totally have that much free time on my hands between college, work, and applying to internships.
I ended up buying a Kaplan book and scoring above the 90^th percentile on both the quantitative and verbal parts of the GRE.
I’m not sure if every location is as bad as this one — but it was bad. And their customer service was horrible. The instruction was ok — but overall I felt it was a waste of time. We would spend 5 minutes on 1 question to make sure that everyone understood — really you can only spend about a minute on each question when you take the test.