this comes to my attention because I routinely see Craigslist ads with $100 or so per hour in wages for people whose credentials would impress clients of a LSAT or GMAT tutoring school. Interestingly, many fewer ads mention MCAT.
Do they keep class size large and teaching hours few to afford the high salaries? Or do majority schools charge high tuition? How does this work?
Can anybody share experiences as either a tutor or a student in such outfits?
My experience is far from recent, but when I decided to go to graduate school, I was undecided between a Ph.D. program in biology or an MBA at the time. As such, I took both the GRE and GMAT and got very mediocre scores on both. Once I researched the prospects for the Ph.D. more and saw that it was likely to be a longer, unpleasant, and far more expensive road versus what I was going to earning at the end, I decided on the MBA. I signed up for the Princeton Review (circa 1995/1996), and if nothing else, it provided me with the discipline to study more for the test each night after a long day of work every day. Ultimately, my score went up about 100 points. In my case, I did great at the math portion, but sucked at verbal, though oddly enough the essay was my strongest section.
If you have the time and discipline to study with a self-help book, I’m convinced you don’t need any of these services. Like anything else, the more familiar you are with the test questions, their format and layout, the timing, and the type of tricks they use that make you pick wrong answers, the better your performance will be. Perhaps the only thing where self help might be an issue is the essay portion, but I’m not so sure the Princeton Review people were any better at providing advice and scoring that than a friend or family member would be.
My daughter and her husband taught LSAT classes a few years ago. They got the job from getting pretty high scores when they took the test. He’s in law school now, she is in grad school in another discipline.
The classes they taught were not that big, and, if the students actually cared, they did see increases in their scores. a lot of it was test taking strategies. As a useful side effect, my daughter used the Princeton Review GRE vocab guide and these strategies and got a perfect score on the GRE when she eventually took them.
They actually think the tutoring works well after they’ve stopped doing it.