Kaplan or Princeton Review

When it comes to test prep, an age old question is whether to with Kaplan or Princeton Review. Both have their merits. Kaplan is the older, more established company with tens of thousands of employees. They've been around since the 1930's. They are even into some online corporate trainings.

Princeton Review was once thought of as the upstart, having been founded by a couple of recent college grads in the 1980's. They've moved well beyond their humble beginnings, though, when they were once known as much for their rankings of best party schools and other college rankings. Today, they have thousands of employees of their own and are a major player in the test prep game.

The reality is that both of these companies have had to evolve over the last decade, as they've face pressure from online, smaller, competitors that are able to adapt quickly. They've also had to adapt, adding online courses themselves in addition to their long running classroom courses. Today, you're just as likely to go with Kaplan or Princeton Review as a self-pace online class as you are for a classroom experience.

But what of the question of Kaplan vs. Princeton Review? Who is the leader here? It really depends on what you are looking for. They each have their own unique offerings. Do you need an ACT classroom provider? It's possible only one of them is in your area. Do you want a summer intensive for the MCAT in an beautiful location? You may want to turn to Kaplan. Need to most comprehensive review book package? I'd suggest visiting the link above for a more detailed comparison of these two fierce competitors on the ACT, GRE, and MCAT exams.

SAT Review Courses

College keeps getting more and more competitive. Did you know that the average SAT score among college bound students is almost 1100 points? I recently posted a Magoosh review, and there is no doubt, they are one of the best test prep options out there. However, there are many test prep options for parents that are looking to improve their child's chances to get into a good school. In addition to Magoosh, I'd advise you to consider both Kaplan and Princeton Review. I may have more to say about these services in a later post, but for now, the thing to realize is that they are the options chosen by parents who are serious about test prep review, not the budget alternatives. If you do need a free alternative, you might want to look at Khan Academy test prep. You won't get an in person instructor or a tutor, but you will get some high quality videos.

Let me know what you think of my test prep review series in the comments below. Do you want to see more posts on this topic?

Magoosh Reviews

Have you heard about Magoosh? They are a new test prep company out of the west coast. They were founded about 10 years ago, but they are already one of the fastest growing out there. They have thousands of kids signing up for their ACT and SAT test prep courses. Why are they growing so fast? There are a few reasons, but I think the biggest is the price. For under $100 you can get a test prep experience that once would have cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The big test prep companies have to take not of this and adjust their prices because if they aren't careful, they are going to get left behind.

Magoosh has a progress dashboard when you login

So is Magoosh any good? There's a Tech Powered Math Magoosh ACT review where you can read more about this in more detail, but yeah, they are quite good. They have several things going for them that make them standout.

• As I said, price. They are affordable.
• They have great mobile apps. Doesn't matter if you like Android or iOS.
• A great set of online experiences from practice questions to video tutorials.

I think this kind of thing will be the wave of the future going forward. I know that people are excited about Khan Academy ACT prep, and there's definitely a place for that. On the other hand, there are always going to be people who want to pay for a premium experience to get an advantage. I think Magoosh offers that. It also helps to have some skin in the game to when it comes to things. It gets people more motivated to follow through, whether it is the students or the parents. 

Here's a demo of what Magoosh has to offer:

Data Science Specialization on Coursera

If you are into online learning, you are probably well aware of Massive Online Open Courses, or MOOCs. They've been around for around 5 years and have become very popular. One of the most popular platforms for MOOCs is Coursera. A few years back, they went to adding specializations. You can think of specializations like a mini-masters degree, but at a much lower cost. Possibly the most popular of those specializations has been the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization (review). The specialization consists of 10 courses which teach students the fundamentals of data science from how to use GitHub through the basics of machine learning. It is entirely taught in the very popular data science language R. 

If you are thinking of getting into data science, it's an excellent set of courses. I'd recommend reading the review above to get a better sense of if this is a good fit for you before jumping in. 

Best Retro Gaming

The original Xbox is a fondly remembered
retro gaming system

OK, so I'm shifting my focus with this post a little bit, toward a different technology, classic video games. Yeah, that's right, I'm giving into the wave hitting the nation, retro gaming. I've actually started work on a new retro gaming site, Retrified Games.

There are so many directions to go with this, it is hard to even know where to start. However, I'm focused on the data of classic gaming. What does the data show that people are playing? Who is sharing these games on Facebook? What's the difference between a Mario game and a Sonic game? What's trending on YouTube? Again, there are a lot of directions to go.

So while I'm far from having it all figured out, I hope you'll join me on the journey. Check out Retrified Games and like it on Facebook or follow on Twitter to learn more. To start, I'm looking at game systems from the NES through the PS2 and everything in between (even some "forgotten systems" like the Turbografx/PC Engine, Sega Dreamcast, and many others). I hope to see you there.

TI-84 Plus CE Review

The TI-84 Plus CE has been out for nearly a year now, and it is going strong. The 84 family continues to be one of the most popular graphing calculators on the market, and this newest edition is no exception. Now that the 84 has been slimmed down and had color added, it is once again a worthy competitor to the other competition that been passing it by in recent years. If you'd like to read more about what is new with the 84 CE, check out this TI-84 Plus CE Review. It'll tell you more about what distinguishes this model from previous generations of the TI-84 Plus.

Spark Dataframes Tutorials

I've got a new post up at my personal blog, and it's a tutorial about Apache Spark. If you are new to Spark, it's a 'big data' solution. I'm very new to it myself, but since there seem to be very few tutorials about Spark online, I thought it would be worth posting one, particularly about dataframes. Dataframes have been part of Spark since Spark 1.3. If you want to learn more, check out my Spark dataframes tutorial in Python. I have recently updated the tutorial to Spark 2.1, so it is much more current than when I first posted it here.