Graduate school, law school, and medical school are weighing heavily on the minds of many Washington University undergraduates this fall.

Students preparing for the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and a host of other exams choose various methods of preparation. Some methods, such as reviewing lecture notes or buying a prep book, are much cheaper than formal coursework.

Prep courses, offered by test-preparation services such as Kaplan and the Princeton Review, prove time-consuming and costly, with courses ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Both Kaplan and the Princeton Review offer review courses for the MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, and GRE.

Is the high cost and time commitment of prep courses worth it?

The numbers answer yes. Students who take standardized tests without a course and then take the test again after coursework garner significantly higher scores the second time around.

According to the Princeton Review, on average, students who take a Princeton Review course see an increase in scores of 8 out of 45 points for the MCAT, 90 out of 800 for the GMAT, 215 out of 800 for the GRE, and 7 out of 180 for the LSAT.

Princeton Review, which shares an office with Nate’s Place on the South Forty, offers lecture-based courses on and off campus, with class sizes ranging from eight to twenty-five people. The LSAT course is 36 hours long, while the MCAT course is 100 hours plus the time needed to do homework.

Nate Breindel, owner of Nate’s Place and campus coordinator for the Princeton Review, said that time outside class to prepare for exams may take at least another 100 hours.

“[Courses] are a very large undertaking,” said Breindel.

Breindel justified the time and cost by judging the outcome.

“This is your future; this is grad school.”

Michael Fine, a senior who took a Princeton Review prep course for the MCAT, said he was impressed with the professors’ knowledge. Fine noted that many of the course’s professors were students at the WU medical school; they could therefore “understand the trivialities” of taking a graduate school exam.

Like Briendel, Fine justified the cost of taking a prep course.

“Once you get your score back and see where it can take you, it’s worth it.”

Kaplan, another popular test prep center, is a division of The Washington Post, from which it receives funding.

The Kaplan test center offers a wide variety of test prep resources, including tutoring, live courses, online courses-including components of live classes-subject-specific courses, practice labs, and a variety of software.

“It gives you structure on how to study. There’s a broad range of information for the MCAT, and [the course] condenses it,” said Rania Abbasi, who took a Kaplan MCAT prep course this summer.

While many who had taken a prep course agree that the courses are not necessary for someone who is motivated and can effectively study the materials for the tests alone, most did not regret taking such courses.

“It forced me to study,” said Felix Yeh of his course on the MCAT.

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