#9 in a series of Q&A’s with representatives of leading LSAT companies
Matt Riley, one of the owners and teachers at Blueprint, conveyed the ‘ethos’ of his company.
How long have you been offering LSAT prep?
Blueprint was founded in the beginning of 2005.
Where are you located?
Our main headquarters are in Los Angeles, but we offer classroom courses all throughout California and New York, and we offer an online video course that’s available anywhere.
Please describe your traditional in-class courses?
Our in-class course was designed with the really motivated student in mind. It is the longest course out there, so there’s 100 hours of live instruction time—and when I say 100 hours, that only includes time where the teacher’s actually up in front of the room teaching the material. A lot of other companies count in practice tests or extra sessions or things like that into their hours; we offer those things as well, obviously, but that 100 hours is just teaching time, so it’s the longest one out there.
I think the class structure is also one of our real strengths—we’ve set it up to be really intuitive for the students, so we start with the basic concepts so then it builds on itself, and we work in a lot of review time at the end, so that students are really ready to take the test by the end of the course. All of our instructors are amazing. We are really selective, because we don’t have as many courses as some of the larger companies. So they all have to score 170 or higher on the test, and they’re hand-selected for their personality, so they can be engaging and entertaining for 100 hours.
One of the great things about Blueprint is because we are younger than some of the other companies out there, our course was actually formed in 2005, and has been updated a couple times since then—we actually just finished a big revision of everything—and so because we’re younger and because we only focus on the LSAT, we’re really able to keep up-to-date with all the new trends and new things that are happening on the test a lot faster than some of the larger companies.
In addition to that, when you take the classroom course, you’re given all kinds of additional resources. Online you get all kinds of drills and quizzes, and then what we’ve been adding recently are lots and lots of explanations—we have written, audio, and a large number of video explanations for the questions that are in the homework, so you can really find funny and helpful explanations for everything that you go over in the course.
And the one thing that we really stress with our classroom course is it’s about the experience. And we just have a different approach than other people—our books have jokes in them, we keep it lighthearted, because we really think that people will learn more and do better if they actually have fun while they’re doing it. So, we’ve dedicated ourselves to doing that. And, just for kicks, our class is cheaper than most of the full-length courses that you’ll find out there. It’s $1199, so you can save a couple hundred bucks while you’re doing it.
Please describe your online options?
Our online option is new and awesome. It is called Blueprint: The Movie—it’s a pretty revolutionary, new product in the field. It’s a streaming, HD, high-quality video course. The Web site is available worldwide, anywhere you can get an Internet connection. It is video lessons that comprise the entire course, so you’re getting everything that the in-class students do. There’s around 50 hours of HD video that you can watch at your own pace, you can watch them as many times as you want, you can review, go over things, space it out in six weeks or six months, whatever works for you. And the cool thing about the video course is it’s actually taught by myself and Trent Teti—we were two of the founders of the company and authors of the Blueprint curriculum, so you literally get to study in the comfort of your living room with the people who wrote the course and probably know more about the LSAT than anybody else out there, and you can do that whether you live in LA or South Dakota, which is nice.
The video lessons really give you a good idea of how our classes are run in general. They get amazing reviews from people, they’re really hilarious, we’re willing to make asses out of ourselves, so that the kids will learn more, which is great. And then we also give our video students help outside of the video lessons, so they can still get some support from the instructors. They get exclusive access to one of our veteran instructors—we call him the study buddy—and he answers any questions that they have in the homework, or if they get stuck on something that doesn’t have explanations. The video course is really great.
The thing that a lot of other companies—what they call interactive online courses or virtual online courses—the problem in our mind, or why we chose to do it a different way, is the whole point of doing a video course is you have the flexibility to do it whenever you want. And with our course you get these really high-quality HD videos that you can blow up and watch on your TV or laptop or anything that you want, as compared to a two-inch little screen where you’re watching an instructor do it in real-time with a PowerPoint presentation, and I just think the experience is not even comparable. And that’s cheap too, so it’s great. It’s only $799, which is a couple hundred bucks cheaper than most of the other online options.
Do you offer a self-study option or study guides?
In terms of self-study, the video course—a large portion of it is self-study because you work through the videos yourself. They’re interactive videos—it’s kind of like taking a course, in that we’ll tell you, “hey, pause the video and try this question,” or “now we’re going to time you to do that question,” so there’s definitely some interactivity with it. You get the video course for two LSAT administrations, which works out to be about six to seven months of access to it. We give you different schedules to work from, so there’s study reminders and things like that, but that is the self-study option that we give you. And then we have other books and publications that we’re working on that should be out soon, and so those will be a cheaper option for students.
Do you offer any one-on-one or individualized tutoring?
Sure. We only offer tutoring for actual Blueprint students, because we feel that the tutoring really works best with people who are taking our course so that they have some understanding of the methods and they have the materials to work through. So we offer tutoring in two different ways. You can either do it as a supplement to the course, whether you’re taking the classroom course or the video course. And we offer it an hour at a time, or there’s packages, where you can save a little bit of money.
And then we also offer tutoring as a stand-alone option for students who just want to take the video course and work with a tutor. We start them off with 30 hours of tutoring and the video course, and that’s a great option if you have a busy schedule or you really want some individual time with somebody who really knows what they’re talking about. So we give people both those options.
What is the focus of your instruction?
When we set up Blueprint, the focus of the actual course was to approach each of the sections of the LSAT with an overarching strategy, where everything kind of fit into a strategy so you could build as the course goes. We actually give students flowcharts where they can see—I make an analogy to a choose-your-own-adventure book where we give you strategies and little questions that you have to ask yourself, but as long as you give yourself little reminders and ask the questions, we work it all into this overall strategy and lead you right to the answers and it works really well. So that’s the focus in setting up the course.
But the focus of Blueprint in general is just based on a different ethos than most other test preparation companies. When people think of test prep, they think it’s terribly boring and just something that you have to do to keep up with everyone else out there, and our approach is a little bit different than that. People come into our course not expecting much, and we get e-mails from people all the time telling us that they actually miss coming to class, it’s a different experience, it’s fun. We infuse the ethos into everything, from the books to the explanations to the people that we hire to teach the courses, and it really is just a different experience from beginning to end. It’s more like a social event sometimes than going to a test prep class.
Do you cater to any particular kind of student?
We don’t specifically advertise for any particular student. The thing about our course is it’s long and it’s intense, and it takes a lot of work. So because of that I think that our course is tailored more for the highly motivated student who’s ready to work and put in a lot of time and effort in order to get the best score that they can. It works for everyone because the classes keep everyone engaged, it’s entertaining, but most of the students that we have are those students who really do want to put in the time to maximize their score, because it is 100 hours over two or three months, so it is a big time investment.
What qualifies someone to teach for Blueprint?
The two qualifications are: number one, you got to have the score—so you have to score a 170 or better on a real LSAT, and that’s great, but the thing that we really look for is just—we started Blueprint with just a few people teaching classes, and the reason why it caught on and the reason why we gained such a strong following is not because the person in the front of the room had a 175, but because the person in the front of the room was funny and a great teacher, and they kept students wanting to come back for 100 hours.
So as we’ve expanded and started hiring more and more teachers, we’ve really kept those same standards. So we fly everyone into Los Angeles for instructor training—a very low percentage of the people we bring in actually ever end up teaching classes for us—but we really put them on the spot. We have a very different approach to training the instructors—it has much less to do with actually teaching them the methodology than getting the people comfortable to express their personalities and keep things interesting for people for 100 hours in front of the class. And so the people that we choose have a rare combination of a really high LSAT score, and the ability to keep you laughing while you’re learning for 100 hours, which is hard to find, but we’ve done a pretty good job of it so far.
What are your company’s unique strengths?
Oh, there’s too many to name. I’ll give you three. First, if you just look at it, we give you more for less. So, objective facts, the deal’s a little bit better—we give you more hours of instruction, it’s 100 hours as I said, for less, which is $1199. And the reason why we’re able to do that is we’re a smaller company, so we have less overhead so we’re able to offer a better deal to people.
Number two, actually we’ve always prided ourselves on the results that we’re able to accomplish with people, and we’re not ashamed to tell people what our results are. A lot of people hide their results or won’t tell you what they end up to be. We publish our average score improvements, and we have reviews all over our Web site from our students. We have a very loyal fan base of people who have done great, and they come back and they tell all of their friends. Our average score improvement is over ten points, which is huge and we don’t do any funny math on that. We count all of our students from beginning to end, and they’re going up over ten points, which is great. So that’s number two.
And the third thing that I think really sets Blueprint apart is all we do is the LSAT. It sounds lame, but when new LSATs come out we have a little party at the office, and we all pore over them for a couple weeks to figure out what’s going on and making sure we’re really keeping up with everything, and we’re teaching our students the right stuff in every class. We’re smaller, we’re more focused, and that allows us to just really make sure we’re doing everything right. It’s all LSAT, all the time.
A lot of LSAT companies say the same things—our classes are great, our instructors are great, you’ll have a great time in class—and the thing that I would urge students to do is actually do a little research. Just look at the Web sites, and I think that if you compared our Web site to the other Web sites out there, in terms of just the personality that’s on there, the instructor bios, how we introduce you to the people who are going to be teaching your class, to the sample videos that show you what class is like. I think if they check those out, they will quickly be able to see why taking Blueprint would be different than taking any other company out there.
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