#3 in a series of Q&A's with representatives of leading LSAT companies.

Patrick O'Malley, Founder of Get Prepped, shared information with me about his company.

How long have you been offering LSAT prep?

About 10 years.

Where are you located?

We’re based out of Colorado, but we do classes nationwide.

Please describe your traditional in-class courses?

With our in-class options, one thing we do that’s a little different is that we do weekend-only classes, so that we either have one, two, or three weekend-long classes, depending on which option the student wants to go for. Basically they’re run from the morning—9 AM or 10 AM, depending on the class, up until 5 PM—and they’ll run on a Saturday and Sunday, and they’ll do that for one, two, or three weekends. That’s one of our biggest scheduling differences from a lot of companies that’ll do classes, say on like a Tuesday and Thursday evening from 6:00 to 9:30, or something like that. We have a limit of 12 students in any of our classes, so that applies to the one, two, or three weekend class.

Please describe your online options?

We don’t offer stand-alone online classes. We have online self-study materials, but they’re integrated with our actual classes, so we don’t sell them separately.

Do you offer a self-study option or study guides?

Not really, we do sell some of our materials, like some of our books we do sell on Amazon, but it’s not an e-course, so to speak.

Do you offer any one-on-one or individualized tutoring?

We’ve got probably one of the more attractive tutoring pricing structures out there. Our normal program is 15 hours of tutoring, and that’s $1,199, and that’s a lot less than what you’re going to find elsewhere. As far as tutoring goes, a lot of that just boils down to the tutor that you’re working with, so we probably can’t talk about curriculum or anything like that, since tutoring is so customized.

What is the focus of your instruction?

As far as focus, we’re absolutely going to cover all the subject areas, and obviously most students for the LSATs—their biggest concern is the games—not everybody but most students, so we’re definitely going to be a little bit more weighted towards that. Even though it’s only 25% of the test score, we’re going to spend more than 25% of our class time on the games, and that’s just what the people need, so that’s what we provide.

Do you cater to any particular kind of student?

Not explicitly. Certainly, you’ve got your classroom vs. your tutoring student—tutoring students are going to be looking for something different out of the experience than a classroom student—but the kind of people who’ll probably end up taking our classes vs. our tutoring are people who want more of an intensive experience, because the longest class is three weeks long, and there’s going to be people out there who want something that’s six weeks long, eight weeks long, or whatever it happens to be. So we’re probably going to appeal more to students who want to get it done in a fairly short time frame—not short, but shorter than some of the other options out there on the market.

What qualifies someone to teach for Get Prepped?

We won’t interview anybody unless they’ve gotten a 94th percentile or higher on the LSAT, and on a real LSAT, so that’s two things right there that differentiate us from our competitors—they’ll allow their instructors or prospective instructors to take non-official LSAT tests at the company offices and qualify that way. Since they aren’t even official tests, they are a bit easier, and they can take them more than once if they need to—so that sounds like it might be a minor distinction at first, but it isn’t if you really start thinking about it, because somebody who gets a 90th percentile on the LSAT means they can miss as many as 20 questions, and that’s a lot of questions to miss. So our instructors all have to have taken a real LSAT, and on that real LSAT have gotten 94th percentile or higher, and what you’ll find in our major markets is that pretty much all our instructors are more like 97th, 98th , 99th percentile, but in some of our more outlying markets we might hire somebody with a 95th percentile, so we give ourselves some flexibility that way. The other difference is that our instructors are all people who are either in law school or have graduated from law school, so it’s a little different than any other company out there that I know of. We just like instructors who have come in to take the test for a specific reason, and didn’t just come in to take the test in order to qualify to teach a class, in addition to the GMAT class, and the GR class, and the SAT class that they happen to be teaching, so a little bit different perspective. Those are the two basic prequalifications that we look for before we’ll even look at interviewing somebody. 

What are your company’s unique strengths?

The benefits that somebody is going to get from taking one of our classes is that—and I’m just going to use specifically for example our three-weekend class and our individual tutoring, since it’s easiest to compare that with what other companies have to offer—but if somebody takes our three-weekend class, they’re going to get 36 hours of classroom time, and that’s roughly an equivalent number of hours than what you get in a Kaplan class. The benefits are a couple: first of all, the class is going to be smaller; second, the instructor will have higher prequalifications to even begin teaching; third of all, the scheduling—and that can be more of a personal issue—but the scheduling is such that it’s more compact, more intense, not spread out over a long period of time, and also because we do them on weekends during the day, we feel that students are fresher and better able to learn from 10 AM to 5 PM than they are from 6 PM to 9 PM. So there’s a certain scheduling advantage there. And definitely price. If you look at our classroom instruction, our three-weekend class is $999, whereas our competitors who have about 36 hours to 38 hours of classroom time are going to be priced more around the $1300-1400 range. So that’s a pretty big differential especially since our classes are smaller. With our tutoring it’s actually even more clear-cut, because with tutoring all the companies offer a 15-hour program, so it makes it easy to compare the number of hours, and really that just boils down to who your instructor is—if you work well with your instructor, you’re going to have a good tutoring—and the one real stark difference between us and Kaplan or Princeton Review in tutoring is just, quite simply, price. Ours is $1199 and theirs is significantly more, I haven’t checked recently, but I know it’s probably at least 50% more. With us you’ll be getting an instructor with far more experience at less than half the price. So it’s kind of a no-brainer really, if someone is going to be taking tutoring somewhere else, they’re making a mistake—they really should be taking tutoring from us—at the end of the day, they’re going to spend a lot less. The one salient point for people who are out there looking, the one thing they’re going to benefit with us is that they’re going to get a smaller class and they’re also going to pay significantly less for instruction that should be as good or better than what they’re going to see elsewhere.