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Kaptest

post #1 of 12
8/13/10 at 12:13am
Thread Starter 
So I decided that during the summer I would study for the LSAT and settled on Kaplan for a course study cucriculum. In class today the teacher, who has not since gone to law school, proudly told us today that she did score in the 90th percentile and that is the basic and only requisite for teaching at Kaplan. Herein lies the inherent problem for aside from parroting off what she prepared for the sessions she can't really explain shit. I decided to call her out on something she said and she proceeded by rewording and subsequently changing her mind all the while accusing me of talking over her. What a cocky and arrogant overconfident bitch! Little twat that she is just barely finished her undergrad and thinks she knows it all. Im working on my second masters degree in another field while finding a small bit of time to study and still scored a 164 yesterday on a second online diagnostic test. Thishappens to be in the same percentile as her and I do not think I am qualified to teach squat. F*ck Kaplan and their sorry excuse for a teacher! There, I've said my piece. Does anyone have any experience with Kaplan? I realize it was a poor choice and I would have been better of with Powerscore. Their Game book is really smart and I assume their teachers are as well.
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post #2 of 12
8/13/10 at 12:53am
I think this is the case with most test prep programs. The teachers are usually a hit or miss, studying the material on your own is most beneficial. I just finished my Princeton Review MCAT course for the summer and my bio teacher was a fcking moron. His only qualification was scoring high on his actual exam but he couldn't explain/didn't know shit. Ironically, he said he worked for "Kraplan" (his words) before coming to Princeton Review (he's only 24). I'm 99.9% sure he got his ass fired from there for sucking so much.

So yeah, Kaplan blows the bbc. Sorry bro
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post #3 of 12
8/13/10 at 7:37pm
Kaplan is great if you're not so great at the LSAT and trying to go from a 148 to a 155 or something. Powerscore and Testmasters are for people who are already pretty good at it and want to go from a 160ish to a 170ish. If you're bright, you're much better off with one of those.

That being said, PLEASE do not be that guy who argues with the LSAT prof during class. Everyone is paying a TON of money for a finite amount of time, and your particular problem is not necessarily everyone else's. You're wasting everyone else's time and therefore money, and will almost certainly be the guy who everyone hates behind his back. If you're so smart, get a private tutor, or just wing it.

-98th percentile according some website I just looked at. Did not take Kaplan, but have dozens of friends who did.
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post #4 of 12
8/14/10 at 8:50pm
Kaplan is well worth the money. They teach you pattern recognition and beat in repetition to you.
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post #5 of 12
8/15/10 at 1:48pm
shouldve gone to powerscore
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post #6 of 12
8/15/10 at 6:11pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by videocrew View Post

-98th percentile according some website I just looked at. Did not take Kaplan, but have dozens of friends who did.
See kaptest website it says here 90th percentile.

Perhaps looking at their website instead of some I wanna be a lawyer blog will yield you the correct info.
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post #7 of 12
8/15/10 at 7:26pm
Doing well on these tests are highly personal, and the skill to achieve that is not transferable to teaching. Kaplan and many other test prep courses have a problem since they need people who took the test, did well on it, and CAN actually teach the skills they adapted to others, which is a difficult if not impossible task. Feynman and Pauling might have been brilliant scientists but I wouldn't in hell want to take any of their classes.
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post #8 of 12
8/15/10 at 9:52pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pantisocrat View Post
Doing well on these tests are highly personal, and the skill to achieve that is not transferable to teaching. Kaplan and many other test prep courses have a problem since they need people who took the test, did well on it, and CAN actually teach the skills they adapted to others, which is a difficult if not impossible task. Feynman and Pauling might have been brilliant scientists but I wouldn't in hell want to take any of their classes.

Uh, pretty sure you're picking just about the worst scientist from the last century to use as an example here. Feynman was a brilliant teacher. I mean hello, Feynman's Lectures on Physics? I'd have killed to have been privileged enough to sit in his classes.
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post #9 of 12
8/16/10 at 3:14pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by GQgeek View Post
Uh, pretty sure you're picking just about the worst scientist from the last century to use as an example here. Feynman was a brilliant teacher. I mean hello, Feynman's Lectures on Physics? I'd have killed to have been privileged enough to sit in his classes.

+1!

I studied with Feyman at Caltech as an undergrad when he was doing his work on variational perturbation theory - his lectures were so popular that people not enrolled in his classes would attend, and people would be sitting on on the steps between the desks.

Pauling was an excellent lecturer as well (look for his talks on molecular valence on YouTube), though less "entertaining" than Feynman.

Now, an example of a brilliant physicist whose lectures are rather impenetrably complex (and hence not very informative) would be David Finkelstein (the father of quantum logic); I was briefly involved in his Quantum Topology Workshop in the late 80s and found that while his lectures were mesmerizing, one later found that one could retain nothing from them. Frustrating!

...

As for Kaplan - or any test prep outfit - one needs to select a teacher/tutor on the basis of referrals; the popularity of test prep has grown so rapidly that these companies are desperate for warm bodies to drop into classrooms as teachers, and it's believed (wrongly) that test performance supplants training.

DH
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post #10 of 12
8/16/10 at 4:08pm
i read a lot of feynman's stories about strippers and art and other things, they were pretty great
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post #11 of 12
8/16/10 at 8:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dhaller View Post
+1!

I studied with Feyman at Caltech as an undergrad when he was doing his work on variational perturbation theory - his lectures were so popular that people not enrolled in his classes would attend, and people would be sitting on on the steps between the desks.

Pauling was an excellent lecturer as well (look for his talks on molecular valence on YouTube), though less "entertaining" than Feynman.

Now, an example of a brilliant physicist whose lectures are rather impenetrably complex (and hence not very informative) would be David Finkelstein (the father of quantum logic); I was briefly involved in his Quantum Topology Workshop in the late 80s and found that while his lectures were mesmerizing, one later found that one could retain nothing from them. Frustrating!

...

As for Kaplan - or any test prep outfit - one needs to select a teacher/tutor on the basis of referrals; the popularity of test prep has grown so rapidly that these companies are desperate for warm bodies to drop into classrooms as teachers, and it's believed (wrongly) that test performance supplants training.

DH

Damn you're lucky. What do you do now?
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post #12 of 12
8/16/10 at 11:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by eztantz View Post
See kaptest website it says here 90th percentile.

Perhaps looking at their website instead of some I wanna be a lawyer blog will yield you the correct info.

98th percentile is where I scored, not where the twit who teaches your Kaplan class needed to score.
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