Intensive 1:1 mentoring, at a price you cannot see
Altius sells intensive one-to-one mentoring rather than a recorded course, and it has a real reputation for large score increases.
It is also the least transparent company on this page: programme pricing is not published anywhere, and every route on the site leads to a consultation.
The only public price is the MCAT First Aid Kit at $301, which bundles the AAMC Online Bundle (worth $390 on its own) with an Altius study manual and practice exams.
As a way to buy AAMC material at a discount, that is a genuinely good deal, and it is unrelated to what the mentoring costs.
What the programmes involve
Heavily vetted mentors, one-to-one time as the core of the product rather than an add-on, and a score guarantee attached to the programmes. The intensity is real and it is the reason the results claims are plausible.
That intensity is also a constraint. These programmes assume a student who can give them a large share of their week.
A student holding down a full course load or a job will struggle to use what they have paid for, and at Altius prices, unused capacity is expensive.
What students tell us about Altius
Altius comes up in hundreds of conversations students have started with us. In a striking share of them, the student had already paid for intensive help and still described a score that had not moved.
We would not read that as a verdict on Altius. The number is small, these are co-occurrences in support mail rather than outcomes, and by definition the students who write to another tutoring company are the ones for whom something did not work.
What it does suggest is that paying more, on its own, is not the mechanism. Intensity helps when it is pointed at the right problem.
Free quiz
The Unbiased MCAT Prep Course Decision Quiz
Three different problems stall an MCAT score, and buying the wrong fix costs months. Six questions sort out which one is yours and what to spend on it. We name competitors and free resources when they beat us, and say so when the answer is spend nothing.
No email required. Your plan appears on screen.
Transparency, before you start. We sell MCAT tutoring and courses, so here are the rules this quiz follows.
- Zero budget, no purchases. Free resources only, and we say so.
- Content gap, buy content first. From whoever does it best, which is usually not us. Our tutoring comes up only as an optional add-on for a big gap.
- Strategy gap, we recommend our own course first. We would put our name against it, and we name a cheaper alternative beside it so you can price us against ours.
- Competitors named and linked when they beat us: UWorld, Kaplan, Blueprint, ExamKrackers, Khan Academy.
- We appear only where we fit, with the budget to match, and always beside a cheaper option.
- Our free MCAT resources show up wherever they fit, and they ask for nothing.
Where it makes sense, and where it does not
The First Aid Kit is worth buying on its own. $301 for a $390 AAMC bundle plus extra materials is straightforwardly good value, whatever you decide about the mentoring.
Hidden pricing is a real cost. You cannot compare Altius against anything else on this page without first sitting through a sales consultation, and that asymmetry is deliberate. Go in with a number you are willing to pay, decided beforehand.
Read the guarantee and the trial conditions closely. Both carry terms, and at this price level the terms are where the value is decided.
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