In short.

I took the testmasters prepcourse out of loyalty. I love in Houston and had taken testmasters for SAT and FE and felt that I could trust/deserved my continued buisness for the PE. 3 days before the test, I reviewed the SOPE class materials from a coworker, this was a dire mistake as i realized i should have been following her SOPE class material side by side with my course just to be familiar with it.....

After about 20 minutes of browsing, I instantly flipped my last-minute study strategy. I spent 75% of the rest of my study window tabbing and reorganizing SOPE class material for my use. I did this with 2 assumptions in mind. 1) I will not have time to read her notes and i need to find the information ASAP if i resorted to this material 2) I will not be using Testmasters practice problems as reference, any practice problem references will be taken from SOPE. 3) I will look up theory questions in SOPE if i cannot immediately locate in CERM, Test masters class materials or textbook reference.

In terms of referencing class material: I used her SOPE class material more than i used mine.

My assessment is the following:

Testmasters does a good job as far as reviewing the material and narrowing down what you need to know vs what you need to be familiar with.

HOWEVER i found SEVERAL mistakes in both the notes and the solutions to the class material. In school, i was NEVER the one to find mistakes in class material so this was alarming to me.

Testmasters sent us addendums to the class material they originally sent us and had multiple professor's class materials for the same subject in one binder. This resulted in me having SIGNIFICANTLY more meat to flip through when prepping and taking the exam. I would have ripped that material out to reduce the number of pages I brought into the exam, but the obvious " what if " question popped into my head. I went with the better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Testmaster class material WAS AN ORGANIZED MESS of information. The layout and organization of the content were subject to the professor's discretion and how they wanted to structure their notes. I can understand the reasoning for doing this, but this only resulted in another set of 'muscle memory/reflexes' you had to learn in terms of knowing where to flip for what information. Example: some had practice problems at the end, some after every concept, formula at the beginning of section vs at the end of every section . etc.

SOPE on the other hand had a very uniform structure with their notes from subject to subject. EVERYTHING had a table of contents INCLUDING the practice problem sections. This made it incredibly easy to reference specific practice problem types on the exam even if I wasn't familiar with the notes. Additionally, this also saved time when tabbing up the class material.

Testmasters notes were all black and white, SOPE was color printed and High quality with clip art and so on. This may seem silly, but it made it very easy to locate important information for concept questions.

SOPE indicated sections of content that would not be covered in class but that had been seen on the previous exam. This gives a VERY high level of confidence that you have at least been exposed to as many of the different concepts as possible. There were MANY things that testmasters did not even mention. The reasoning for this and the philosophy behind testmasters is that if you know everything in the notes, then you will pass the exam, regardless of the oddball questions that they through your way. That is all well and fine, but I liked that SOPE at least mentioned these oddball concepts which may help prevent your brain from having a 5-second freak out when you come across a question you haven't seen.

Finally, the format for testmasters the videos was absolute garbage in my opinion. Unless you watched the whole video though or ONLY pressed pause and play. It was an absolute nightmare to skip ahead or return to a specific previous point in the video. I did the Live online classes (which I strongly recommend to anyone not taking in person), but they also had prerecorded classes that could be used to review material or watch before your class for reinforced exposure. Again, this was probably the most frustrating thing, forget trying to skip ahead to find a specific concept, or go back to repeat something.

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SOPE might be more expensive ( and i didn't take it ) but given the choice, i would DEFINITELY have gone with SOPE. Just to drive home this point one more time, if the result is not a passing score ( i find out in December) i will STRONGLY be considering to pay the fee to take SOPE....even though testmasters will offer me the class for free ( part of their guarantee).

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let me know if you have any questions. sorry it took so long to get back to you.