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Dear Dr. Buckleitner: My name is Karan Goel and I'm the CEO and co-founder of PrepMe, an online SAT preparation service that you recently reviewed with a group of test students. We appreciate the candid feedback and review of our product. Our number one goal is to help our students succeed and we are extremely committed to that goal. If you have other suggestions that we can use to improve our product, we would greatly appreciate them. Though there is no excuse for many of the shortcomings you highlighted, we have made tremendous progress in the last year since you reviewed our product and look forward to this year¹s review. We have made enough progress to have been featured on the front cover of FORTUNE Small Business' November 2005 issue, and have continued to help hundreds of students since. Since your review, the temporary technical issues you noted have long since been resolved, we have moved into a full-time staffed office in both Chicago and the Bay Area with dedicated land-lines. We also moved the course onto our own adaptive learning technology which is far more robust than the ASP we were using in the past and made the offer to all previous students to extend their course for free onto our new system. We also launched a new web site in late August with a defined privacy policy at http://www.prepme.com/about/privacy.htm - we do not sell our students' information to anyone else and do not market or advertise to our students.We have added practice questions and tests to the site along with online diagnostic testing. We will soon be adding narration to all of the lessons from a professional audio-book narrator along with podcasting features. In addition, every student is entitled to four practice essays with detailed feedback. I have attached a sample of this feedback. All of our tutors are highly trained and high scorers themselves. They are friendly college students who work hard with the students to motivate them and guide them through the process while answering questions and helping with strategies. Furthermore, we have hundreds of satisfied students and parents who have greatly benefited from our services. One of these parents gave the testimonial below and I would be happy to put you in touch with any of the numerous happy parents whose child has used our services: ***** "My son benefited greatly from PrepMe's course because of its unique ability to provide focused and resistive learning in the areas where he needed the greatest improvement. Furthermore, as a parent, I liked the ability to be engaged in the process and apprised of my son's progress. My son connected well with his tutor and the other team members he interacted with at PrepMe because they themselves were recent high school grads who had themselves aced the SAT." -Sangita Kumar, mother of Raj ***** Lest we have you thinking this is a hollow attempt to make excuses, we are extremely excited to have you review our product again this year. We would be more than willing to have your students participate for free, or if you think that might bias your offer we would donate a $1000 scholarship which could then anonymously be used to purchase our course. I want to make myself available to speak with you on the phone or meet in person if you happen to be in Chicago. You can reach me at 773.834.9767. Thank you for your feedback and we look forward to being reviewed again. Sincerely, Karan Goel CEO karan@prepme.com
May 2, 2005 A reader responds to WebWatch guidelines: Dear Consumer Reports WebWatch: "Web sites should clearly disclose the physical location where they are produced, including an address, a telephone number or e-mail address." I can't begin to say how hypocritical this seems to be. I searched the ConsumerReports.org's entire Web site looking for an email address, and I found two, both of which bounced back my e-mails. Before judging others, it might do CR [Consumer Reports] well to assess itself and its own accessibility. I joined, but I'm still disgusted that I couldn't e-mail some questions I have that weren't answered ANYWHERE on the site, including FAQs, which I have never found very helpful on any Web site, not just CR's. Sincerely, Shannon Bryony
March 29, 2005 Dear Consumer Reports WebWatch: Thank you so much for your 3/15/05 article by Mitch Lipka, "Searching For Jobs, Finding Scams." Not knowing that this opportunity was a scam, I've been communicating with the person mentioned in the article (jennie@childdream.org), Ms. Jennie Kohovski, for a couple of weeks now. We've had several e-mail communications, in which I was asking questions about the job offered. Her responses all made the opportunity seem legitimate to me and just yesterday I sent her my address to which she (supposedly) will be sending an employment contract. I'm so glad that I found this article before I got any further involved, because now I know to have nothing to do with that "job opportunity." Thanks again! Sincerely, Amanda Kurtz
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