<p>I am currently taking an Ultimate Classroom course offered by the Princeton Review, which my parents shelled out 1000 bucks for, and quite frankly, the classroom course is beyond subpar. It’s pretty terrible.</p>
<p>I was a student who scored a 2100 on the initial Diagnostic Test, so at first, I was a bit disappointed by the score but optimistic that the PR course would help. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I got stuck in a class with 5 others who ALL scored in the 500s for each section. Not only that, but I believed a smaller number of students would constitute more attention to each student, but again, I was wrong. I felt the overall course to be incredibly slow and the instructor, although intelligent, robotically followed the prep book to instruct us. I felt that I could have just read the book on my own.</p>
<p>For the math, my instructor repeatedly encouraged me to use “Plugging In” and “POOD” but I refused to use anything but strict algebra, which I felt I was very strong in. He suggested that using his techniques would in fact be faster than using algebra with practice but I felt that that was quite bluntly impossible. How could drawing out a chart and plugging in the answers for a simple question like “What number, when doubled and then subtracted by 6, would result in 7” be faster than using algebra? </p>
<p>And for the reading, my weakest subject, I learned idiotic techniques such as reading just the line in the line reference questions and maybe a couple sentences before it to find the correct answer. I tried using these techniques at first, but found that they actually decreased my score even more, so I reverted back to my old ways of reading an entire paragraph before answering the line references.</p>
<p>Not only that, but for the later Diagnostic Tests I noticed my scores skyrocketing, up to the 2300s. After reading my score report and the number of questions I got wrong, I realized that I had not improved by much at all; what gave me a higher score was the easier scales they gave me. For example, 3 wrong on the First Diagnostic Test gave me a 710 but 1 wrong on the Third gave me an 800. </p>
<p>Overall, I felt cheated out of my money. I highly advise you not to enroll in the “Ultimate” Classroom, a shady institute which provided me near-zero help.</p>