With a 1250 on the PSATs, I was enrolled by my parents, who hoped one of their children would go to an Ivy. The 1350 which was guaranteed by Princeton Review should get me there, they thought. So in April of 1999 I went to PR.
First they give you a diagnostic test, which I scored 1200 on. Not a big difference, but I am sure they underscored. This is a practice that has been rumored by the students, and echoed by the teachers for years. Underscore the first tests, so PR looks better when your score improves. A very good marketing technique.
I will review the Math and Verbal classes independently.
Math was the more enjoyable part of PR. My teacher was a very nice college student, who always tried to make the class fun. Yes, he went by the book, teaching techniques, and always emphasizing that one did not have to know much to do well, but only had to know how to outsmart the College Board, always referred to as the Evil Testing Service (ETS). I remember learning tricks like "Plumber's Butt" (for formulas), FONZE (for testing fractions, one, negative, zero and exaggerated numbers), and a few others that PR had thought up. They also explained the scoring process, which basically works out to that if you can eliminate 2 out of 5 choices, you should guess. All the students received individual diagnostic time, and were told what types of questions they should just ignore because they probably wouldn't get them correctly. (positive reinforcement?)
Verbal was similar to what I imagine the Army might be like. The teacher was very strict, having us memorize dozens of words from the "Hit Parade". The HP is PR's patented vocab list of words that commonly appear on the SATs. We had verbal vocabulary tests, and also written ones. This teacher was obviously not interested in making class interesting, and was very monotonous.
In the end, my score went up only 20 points. My Verbal score went down, not considerably, but if you look at the breakdown, it's very interesting. Before Princeton Review, I had 95% of the sentence completions correct. After, it went down to about 60%. After spending a summer forgetting everything, I took the SATs again. This time I got a 1300, and my sentence completions were back up to 95%. Hmmmmm.

A friend of mine could not afford a review course, so she took the $30 review offered by our high school. Her score went up over 200 points.



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