Manhattan LSAT vs. Kaplan LSAT
The most obvious and important difference between Kaplan and Manhattan LSAT is how each company ensures teacher quality.
Teacher Quality
Kaplan generally requires LSAT instructors to hold a 163 or higher on an LSAT, which may be administered by them, while we require our teachers to have a 99th percentile score (172 or higher) on an officially-administered LSAT.Kaplan’s does offer an “LSAT extreme” class for which teachers must hold a 95th percentile score (166). I think that says it all about the score requirement issue.All of our teachers must have a top score.
Selection
But, as we’ve seen many times in auditions, scoring well on a test is one thing, being able to teach others how to get to that level is another.We’re extremely careful about who we hire.Here’s a break-down of the audition process:
1.We filter the resumes we receive, looking for people with a top score and 2 or more years of teaching experience.
2.We conduct a phone interview to get an initial sense of the person and his or her communication skills.
3.We conduct an online teaching audition to do an initial filter of those who don’t know how to teach in an engaging and effective manner.
4.We fly any candidate who has reached this stage to our offices in NYC and watch them teach a live class.
5.We train instructors and then do an intense final assessment of their ability to teach our curriculum before he or she is in front of a class.
Less than 20% of those who make it to the live audition are hired.I think that fourth stage is the most important – a resume and a phone call cannot tell us whether someone really knows how to teach.We look for folks who know the content backwards and forwards, and also know how to run an interesting, fun and effective class.
Salary & Training
Another point of difference is compensation.We pay $100 per hour to all our instructors.Kaplan starting pay is somewhere between $20 and $30 per hour.We know that if we want to attract and retain top talent, we need to pay a compelling salary.That said, this does not mean our classes are super expensive, our prices are comparable with or less than Kaplan’s.
There’s also a significant difference in how each company trains its instructors.For starters, our instructors must complete our entire course, including all the HW.Each instructor in training is assigned a trainer as well.Most large test-prep companies simply put their new instructors in a few group training sessions.
I am quite confident that there are some very talented Kaplan instructors, but the bottom line is that we make sure that every single one of our teachers is phenomenal, that way you don’t have to worry about what sort of instructor you’ll have.
Curriculum
In terms of curriculum, I took a Kaplan LSAT course years ago, and so cannot speak to the differences with much confidence or authority.However, from recent student feedback, I can say that our course seems to have a greater emphasis on mastery through flexibility – particularly in the logic game section.I have worked with several students who already had read a Kaplan guide, and it seems that we emphasize a different style of attack.For logical reasoning, for example, we are less focused on translating logic and more focused on understanding arguments in a meaningful way, and learning how the LSAT tricks us with tempting wrong answers.We also emphasize learning an overall “stance” towards reading LSAT arguments and passages.A final difference that some “cross-over” students have noted is that we use only real LSAT questions (except for a few sample logic games that we write ourselves in order to focus on a specific issue).
In terms of Kaplan’s advantages over Atlas, the most important one is that Kaplan classes are more numerous and probably closer to most everyone’s home (except for our online classes, which are in your home!).