Altius Test Prep Review

[Armz]

I just finished the Altius long-track program at the University of Kansas but I would definitely NOT recommend Altius even to my worst enemy! TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE. For starters they claim to give you 2 weeks to try out Altius and if you don't like it you can get a full refund. What they DON'T tell you is that this 2 weeks starts from the date of purchase - my tutoring sessions didn't even start until a month after I had purchased the program so this guarantee is basically worthless. They also didn't have a tutor for me and tried to get me to change programs to online tutoring (I specifically wanted in-person tutoring because I learn better that way). So it took them a month to figure it out. Fast-forward to the actual program. My tutor was not knowledgeable of all of the topics presented in the Altius materials - instead he would just pick two or three concepts from each lesson that he felt comfortable with and wouldn't teach any of the other information. The altius materials emphasize that the students constantly should ask their tutors in-depth questions about the topics. When I did this my tutor would just respond "just memorize it" - NOT HELPFUL AT ALL. The tutors are extremely inconsiderate of student's time and do not honor their commitments - I had three tutoring sessions where I prepared the lesson, drove to the site to meet, and received an email 5 minutes before our meeting time from my tutor that they had to cancel. Many of my friends in the program had the same experience of constantly having their sessions being cancelled. The tutors were also not responsive to messages - it would take me a week to reach my tutor to schedule a session when I would text AND email them (not exaggerating). I was so fed up that I contacted management and they were extremely rude and not helpful - but they did happily point out that there are NO REFUNDS for any services not received. I cannot tell you how many times they stressed that they do not provide refunds instead of actually correcting the problem. Even after they supposedly talked to their tutors the scheduling conflicts continued. I was so disappointed in the services that I contacted my credit card company for a refund (which I got thankfully). But what can you expect from a company that is run by 4 people online with no real offices (their 'headquarters' address is the founder Lauren's home).

Now I want to talk about their test prep materials. You are given a print manual in addition to an online version of their lessons, questions, answer keys, and practice tests. There are SO many mistakes in their materials - not just printing mistakes but actual conceptual mistakes. Every lesson has a mistake (if not multiple mistakes) and multiple mistakes on the practice test. The answer keys also DO NOT MATCH the numbering of the question set in the manual so you have to go through and manually figure it out (waste of time). The practice tests also have incorrect explanations and answer keys, which makes the scoring unreliable (for example it will say answer C is correct then the explanation will say answer A is incorrect and give reasoning that doesn't match).

Overall I obviously would NOT recommend Altius to anyone (especially at The University of Kansas). Save your money and buy more materials or go to a bigger company like Kaplan.

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[Altius Premier Tutor]

Wow. Not sure where to even start. This student joined SDN only to write this review and is copying/pasting it around the internet. This student wanted a refund many weeks after the trial period was over and threatened to smear us on the web unless we caved to their demands. We will be the first to admit that a tutor who unexpectedly quit at KU last year caused some reshuffling that was inconvenient for the students, including this one. However, the student makes many false statements and leaves out many important details, such as the fact that in light of these difficulties we offered the affected students several concessions, options and freebies. The Altius 2-Week Trial starts on the date of purchase and is hardly something we hide or "DON'T tell you." It is listed in 30pt font on every single page of our website, is listed in bold blue font at checkout, and is in the terms and conditions which this student acknowledged having read and agreed to before checkout. I won't dignify this entire laundry list of false claims with responses. Many are plain silly or easily disproven (I am sitting right now in the main Altius office in AZ and it's not the founder's house...if it is, he lives in an office building...I assure you there are more than four people working for Altius, or else we are getting duped because we have 60+ people on payroll...while there are indeed some errata in our materials they have all been double-blind peer reviewed by PhD scientists from schools like USC, Columbia, Cornell and Harvard--something other prep companies cannot say and which make our materials anything but what this student describes...and so on and so forth). If you are considering Altius and this troubles you, please give us a call and we'll give you actual documentation rather than hearsay. Also remember that the Altius 2-Week Trial this student disparages gives all students two full weeks from the date of purchase to investigate the program for themselves and still get a refund if unhappy for any reason--so do your own first-hand research and reach your own conclusions.