There’s the quick version and the long version here. For those of you with stuff to do, here’s my guarantee, the strongest one in test prep–unmatched by any company I’ve ever heard of–short and sweet, no fine print:
“I guarantee your satisfaction with any test prep video course you buy from me. If you are unhappy with your purchase for any reason, you can let me know within 30 days of your purchase and get every penny back, with no questions asked.”
Really? Really. Here’s the longer story behind our iron-clad, industry-leading guarantee, if you’re interested:
Put yourself in my shoes for a minute–imagine that you have a way to look at standardized tests that tends to make them significantly easier for you and your students than they are for most people. Imagine that a lot of the advice you give (don’t memorize vocabulary words, don’t learn formal logic, don’t take a thousand practice tests, et cetera) probably sounds crazy to most people who don’t know your results firsthand.
If you’re in that position, how do you help people realize that it’s okay to trust you with their time and energy?
The strongest way to do that, I believe, is with an iron-clad guarantee. So that’s what I went with. Please let me explain (and then let me contrast that with what most other test prep companies seem to do–even if you don’t work with me, you should know what you’d be getting into with a big company).
Our Refund Policy
Let me explain the refund policy that all of my online video courses carry:
If you decide, for any reason, that you don’t like my course within 30 days of buying it, all you have to do is send me an email and we’ll refund your purchase. No hard feelings, no questions asked. That’s it. No fine print.
So Now For The Obvious Questions . . .
A lot of people can’t believe that’s really my refund policy. But it is. And I can only stay in business with a refund policy like that because the vast majority of the people who try my courses like them–if I were getting tons of refund requests and chargebacks and complaints, our company wouldn’t last too long.
Some people ask if I’m worried about getting taken advantage of. I’m not really worried about it, frankly. I know it happens once in a blue moon, but I see it like this: If I’m going to share my underground test-prep ideas and try to prove to people that standardized tests are much, much easier than they think, then I’m going to have to bend over backwards to reassure them that I’m for real. When you’re constantly contradicting the mainstream, you have to prove that you’re legit. Having the strongest guarantee in the industry lets me show people, perhaps better than anything else would, that my approach works.
Wait a second . . . what does everybody else do?
If you’ve looked around on the Internet, I’m sure you’ve seen that lots of test prep companies claim to offer strong guarantees.
But their guarantees typically come with some significant fine print. Let’s take a look at the “money-back guarantee” of one of the most popular test-prep companies, Kaplan. Here’s the link to their guarantee page.
Read the fine print all they way at the bottom. Here are their stated requirements for qualifying for their “higher score guarantee”:
- As a first-time Kaplan student, you enroll in and complete an HSG-eligible program for which you have paid in full.
- You establish a baseline score either by completing a Kaplan proctored diagnostic or by providing a previous official test score from the test administrator.
- You take the official test after completing all requirements for your specific program.
- Within 60 days of your Kaplan program expiration date, log in to your Kaptest account and contact us via the Support tab or chat to provide us your official test score report.
Didn’t pay full price? Never established an acceptable baseline ahead of time? You didn’t complete all requirements? Didn’t submit your official score report within 60 days of the end of your course? Sounds like you’re out of luck.
As stated above, in order to exercise the guarantee, you have to demonstrate that you did everything Kaplan asked. That sounds pretty reasonable on the surface, right? The problem is that Kaplan, like most traditional test prep companies, seems to ask you to do a lot of stuff. When I was a Kaplan instructor, back a million years ago (which lasted all of a couple of months), I remember the manager of the center telling me that nobody ever completed everything, so he never had to refund anyone. The most he ever had to do was let somebody re-take the class for free. But seriously–if taking the class didn’t help you the first time, why would re-taking it suddenly help the second time?
The other giant of traditional test-taking is Princeton Review. To be honest, I was going to copy and paste some of their guarantee page here and then make fun of it, but it’s also convoluted I can’t even find one part to focus on. If the rest of your day is wide-open, take a look for yourself and you’ll quickly get an idea of how they do things over there.
Other companies do pretty much the same thing. For example, Testmasters guarantees that if you complete everything and their course doesn’t raise your score, you can re-take the course that didn’t help you raise your score, just like Kaplan and Princeton Review.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really find those guarantees too compelling. Why would you want to re-take a course that didn’t help you the first time? Why should missing one assignment keep you from exercising a guarantee?
The Strongest Guarantee In Test Prep?
As far as I’m aware, the 30-day, no-questions-asked, 100% guarantee that backs my online video courses is the strongest guarantee in the entire industry. It’s stronger than the guarantees offered by the most prominent traditional companies, like Kaplan, Testmasters, and Princeton Review, and it’s stronger than anything else I’ve run across.
If you don’t like my course within 30 days, you just let us know and don’t pay for it. Period.
I can only offer such a strong guarantee because my approach works, and the vast majority of my students are happy with it.