What's the company culture at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions?

Every business has it's own style. What is the office environment and culture like at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions?

Are people dressed in business casual, jeans and t-shirts, or full-on suits? Do folks get together for Friday happy hours and friendly get-togethers?

What is a typical day in the life of an employee at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions?

Working as an instructor for Kaplan is not cool. They use illegal business practices such as "off the clock" overtime which you are not paid for. It easily takes over 40 hours a week to prep and teach two sections of an SAT course, but you get paid for 10 in class and 10 out of class prep.

they make you waste so much of your time using marketing catchphrases that an instructor can not get in any time to actually teach. they drain your individual teaching style out of you, and make you follow a rigid program...

students typically complain that kaplan instructors "read straight from the book" well... they have to or they get fired.

as far as culture - everyone wears business casual. no one speaks to eachother via phone, everything is done via email. everyone is very cold. things are very disorganized

kaplan instructors are classified as parttime, but its is more acurate to call it temp position cuz your hours are not fixed, its up to whoever makes the class schedules. lessons are scripted! you have to say business-speak buzzwords and catch phrases and plug other kaplanproducts. you are basically a sales person, not a teacher.

i worked in the greatlakes region, and we had crazy management turnover, 4 'directors', 3 academic managers (people in charge of hating the instructors) and 5 marketing managers in something like 3 years.

(mis)management will always cram as many students as they can into a class, mixture of all diff levels. they have the mony to split up the classes into dummies and averagies, but they will make you teach 15-17 people with wildly varying levels of prep'dness. also, they funnel really dumb students into classes , when those students would be better served by the private tutoring options. basically the whol enterprise is mismanaged at the botom level. and don't get me started on the scripted lessons and lesson typos!

pay is average, you can make more money at some local tutoring/teacing business

Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions is a poor excuse for a company. I wouldn't say that about too many companies.

They use the "job search" process as mostly a free advertising session for themselves. They collect resumes, tell you about their MCAT program, and then send you a cold e-mail (no phone call) saying you weren't hired. When I asked (via email) for one reason why I was not hired and a critique of my audition, I never heard back from them. If I was in high school again, I'd like to "egg" one of their buildings.

I was a "student advisor" for Kaplan which is basically just a receptionist/office assistant type position. I thought the company was great when I first started working there. Everyone was nice and everything seemed to run smoothly but boy was I wrong. I only worked there for three months and in that time we went through two center managers, one academic manager, and two center directors. It was just crazy, I have never seen anything like it. No one got along. I was personally involved in a huge spat between two teachers where one of them ended up being let go. Kaplan only let my center have two managers (one center and one academic) and they had so much work to do that they had to push off some of it on me. Also, the marketers literally do nothing all day. They sit in their office and talk and laugh and get no work done. I never saw them putting flyers up, grass-roots marketing, etc, and we never had events in the center(when we did they were a joke and no one came). Therefore, all the work that they don't do has to get done by someone and of course it ends up being the student advisor. I had so much work that some nights I had to stay until after midnight and then I got yelled at for going over my time and they told me that they aren't going to pay me for that. If I went home when I was supposed to though, and didn't get all the work done, I got yelled at for that too. I got paid minimum wage and we got no breaks no matter how long we work which I'm pretty sure is illegal. One of the teachers told me that they cut her pay without telling her and took two hundred dollars off her next paycheck due to some mistake they had made on a previous one, once again without tellin her. They say the reason our pay is so low is because we get a free course, but our center required that you work at that location for two years before you could get the class and no one even came close to putting up with the crap for that long. None of our students were happy either. BAD COMPANY!

anonymouse in Edison, New Jersey

You didn't get hired because you did not do a good job on the auditions. The e-mail is to save time. Many companies did not a give a reason as they are scared of a lawsuit-that the company would win for not hiring somebody but because of the cost of the lawsuit.