MCAT Classes?

I talked to a few friends who's done the MCAT in the past and some of them recommended taking prep courses such as Kaplan and Princeton Review. From what I heard, these courses are good because they teach you more than just the material covered in MCAT but also strategies such as time management and stress relief techniques (I totally need to learn that right now...) Also I was told that these prep courses provide huge databases of practice questions to better prepare their students.

All these sounded very appealling... then I went on their websites to find out more about them and their price scared me, lol... I was expecting something in the ball park of $500, alas all of them cost well above $1000 (!@#$%^&) ... I start to ask myself: Do I really need it?

I think for the time being I am going to study on my own. Then in a few weeks I will attempt a practice exam to assess my progress, and from that I will decide whether or not the class is necessary.

If I decide to take the class, another question remains -- which class should I take? According to my research the three courses that really stand out are Kaplan, Princeton Review and Prep101. From my SAT experiences back in the days, I think Kaplan would be a good choice (although I somehow still managed to fall asleep during my SAT and end up flunking it...). I have heard a few nice things about Princeton Review as well. The only thing I have against is that its classes are screezed into a very short time frame, where as Kaplan spreads its classes out over a much longer period of time, which would allow time for the digestion of materials learnt. As for Prep101, I don't personally know of anybody who has taken it, but out of the three it provides the most number of hours of instructions. I don't know if that's just because their instructors are slow at talking or because they actually have more to say.

Well, for now I will be reading the books I just got from the library. I was lucky to be the first to grab the Kaplan MCAT 2010-2011 Premier in the library. It does look pretty thick, and I don't think the library will allow any renewal because this is the MCAT season... meaning that I have to about 1000 pages in three weeks... *sigh* FML