#6 in a series of Q&A’s with representatives of leading LSAT companies.
Josh Anish, Senior Editor for Knewton, shared details on this new company.
How long have you been offering LSAT prep?
We have been offering LSAT prep since February of this year, so only nine months or so.
Where are you located?
We are located in New York City, but we have actually no brick-and-mortar school centers—we are all online all the time. We’re an internet start-up that happens to be in New York.
Please describe your traditional in-class courses?
We offer a full course that is 36 hours long. Part of our business model/sell is that we offer the very best teachers, because we are able to just broadcast on the internet, so you’re not privy to the whim of the strip mall test prep teacher. We only have about eight LSAT teachers on staff, and they are some of the very best in the country. So it’s live hours in the classroom that’s also then available on demand afterwards. And then we have a very robust backend, which is your homework and your pretests and your practice tests, in which we have every LSAT question ever written explained and tagged at very specific levels.
Please describe your online options?
Again, we’re all online, so what I just described to you is the product.
Do you offer a self-study option or study guides?
We have quite a bit of content in the course—we have hundreds of content pieces, and over 5,800 questions explained—but no, there’s nothing tangible about us. We’re an online-only model, so there’s no book. The book is the content within the course on the internet.
Do you offer any one-on-one or individualized tutoring?
We do in very specific cases. We offer some pretty great customer service people ready with questions all the time, but if a student is ready, and quite a bit, where it appears he/she needs a bit more work, we offer a private tutoring option. But we hope to have a customer service option within the course that answers all the student’s questions, but on rare occasions have we asked a student to receive some private tutoring from us.
What is the focus of your instruction?
Our CEO, Jose, comes from 18 years of test prep, and he likes to approach the test in what he calls the ‘structuralist’ manner, in that there’s a core structure to the LSAT— certain questions and patterns repeat themselves for decades, and we try to teach the underlying structure of the test, so it’s not necessarily all concepts and tips. We break apart the test and reverse engineer it. On the backend, we tag our questions very specifically. Some questions have up to eight tags—you know, this is an assumption-denier question or a negation of a negation question—and then at the end we can show you very specifically what you do and do not need to work on.
Do you cater to any particular kind of student?
We like to think that it’s adaptive learning—that it caters to every student, every student has a unique skill set that we’re able to isolate and pinpoint weaknesses from. Each student is then able to create certain quizzes based on what he/she wants to work on. So while there’s one kind of sacrosanct course, your work on your own, your heuristic learning, is pretty personalized.
What qualifies someone to teach for Knewton?
First of all, it’s experience and dynamicism in front of the camera, so it’s some kind of rare cocktail of the two. So our teachers are very experienced, and they are able to hold someone’s attention for three hours live online.
What are your company’s unique strengths?
Our top unique strengths are the fact that we’re only online, so for folks who are ready to take the test prep online, we are ready and waiting for them. We’re online only, so all of our resources go into our online course, and that enable us to hire the best teachers, to have the most robust technology. We are becoming more and more of a technology company—very soon our adaptive learning engine will be able to have auto-generated quizzes based on students’ weaknesses, so you can go through and do your homework and we can pinpoint exactly what you need to work on, and serve you 10–15 questions based on that concept until you have mastered it. We think that’s quite an evolution of test prep.
We’re also very proud of our money-back guarantee, so if a student doesn’t go up at least five points on the LSAT, we return tuition in full.
Read the full article: LSAT Prep Company Reviews: Knewton Q&A