First, it is overpriced, unless you are taking the course, at $300 for three videos, it takes advantage of the foolhardy and weak in math student. But no one is forcing you to buy it right? There are three more short videos called workshops, but there are three main videos: Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry. The workshops are brief overviews with little minisections – some 1 min and 30 seconds, hardly worth $300.
There is no syllabus, although Kaplan says that the list of things to do is the syllabus, the “book” chapter comes first, but this chapter needs some background to do the exercises, so I did the workshops first, which were still not a lot of help because the explanation is so brief. There are better explanations on middle school math websites.
I started with the algebra, it started out ok, but quickly picked up pace, there are questions on the video that you must follow along and do, these questions are printed very tiny on the screen and then they are not numbered, similarly after they show you the list of questions, they give you an un-numbered equally tiny vertical list of answers. So you have to figure out which is which and out downwards again and again, which wastes time and further frustrates. Then all of the questions are not explained, so if you did get some wrong, you can only guess the proper solution, they only work out a few of the questions. These same questions are in the chapter PDFs that you get with the course, but if you don’t have a printer, you need to have three screens open at the same time to check your answer and follow along – the video, the chapter with the questions, and the separate chapter with the answer.
They say it comes with a “book” but it is really six PDF files, three “chapters”, one for each video with little to know explanations, many black spaces Kaplan-style – that you fill in what the teacher says, so you can’t really do anything with the book before the video, and three PDFs with answers for these questions that are never explained, then some quiz questions which I found equally useless because I can find questions with no explanations anywhere, I wanted a comprehensive review not just questions. The best part of the Algebra review was a brief explanation of substitution and combination, which was really not a review because it does not really explain when to do each and how to follow this sequence for different GMAT/OG questions, AND that part is better explained on a free Kaplan video that can be found on YouTube.
Then when I called customer service for technical issues I just got the run around and called twice being on hold for 30 minutes each. TERRIBLE, Kaplan is great on Marketing, but terrible once they have your money!!!![]()
There is no syllabus, although Kaplan says that the list of things to do is the syllabus, the “book” chapter comes first, but this chapter needs some background to do the exercises, so I did the workshops first, which were still not a lot of help because the explanation is so brief. There are better explanations on middle school math websites.
I started with the algebra, it started out ok, but quickly picked up pace, there are questions on the video that you must follow along and do, these questions are printed very tiny on the screen and then they are not numbered, similarly after they show you the list of questions, they give you an un-numbered equally tiny vertical list of answers. So you have to figure out which is which and out downwards again and again, which wastes time and further frustrates. Then all of the questions are not explained, so if you did get some wrong, you can only guess the proper solution, they only work out a few of the questions. These same questions are in the chapter PDFs that you get with the course, but if you don’t have a printer, you need to have three screens open at the same time to check your answer and follow along – the video, the chapter with the questions, and the separate chapter with the answer.
They say it comes with a “book” but it is really six PDF files, three “chapters”, one for each video with little to know explanations, many black spaces Kaplan-style – that you fill in what the teacher says, so you can’t really do anything with the book before the video, and three PDFs with answers for these questions that are never explained, then some quiz questions which I found equally useless because I can find questions with no explanations anywhere, I wanted a comprehensive review not just questions. The best part of the Algebra review was a brief explanation of substitution and combination, which was really not a review because it does not really explain when to do each and how to follow this sequence for different GMAT/OG questions, AND that part is better explained on a free Kaplan video that can be found on YouTube.
Then when I called customer service for technical issues I just got the run around and called twice being on hold for 30 minutes each. TERRIBLE, Kaplan is great on Marketing, but terrible once they have your money!!!