Lilly Robinson
Reviewer
0 helpful votes
This is a scam business!
Please avoid this place! It is a scam business. I attended C2 Education in Germantown for several years and had a beyond disappointing experience. I attended for their PSAT, SAT, and college essay help, and unfortunately did not get much out of it, and I feel bad for my parents who wasted tens of thousands of dollars. The only good thing I have to say is that majority of the tutors themselves are very kind and are aware of C2's broken system. However, C2's business model is based on manipulation and guilt tripping parents and students to buy hundreds of tutoring hours and spend 6 hours a day at C2 for an unreasonably high price. The manager, Angela Kim, claims to be a certified college counselor but is actually just a deceptive saleswoman that gave me unrealistic and poor-quality college advice. They give middle schoolers SATs and when they score low relative to an 11th grader (simply because they haven't learned the concepts in school), they show this to naive parents as a justification of calling their child stupid and in desperate need of their tutoring services. They then shove a non-refundable contract in your face, expecting you to pay upfront costs comparable to the cost of a nice brand-new car. When students or parents are on the fence about buying so many hours during their post-diagnostic test sales pitch, they say stuff like "well if you actually wanted to work hard and be a good student you would come here and study" which is incredibly manipulative. They also call students "severely behind in math" for taking calculus their senior year of high school instead of freshman, sophomore, or junior year, which is absolutely untrue. They will downright try to tell you that your child will be unsuccessful without their tutoring services. They also will lie about your results on diagnostic tests. I took a diagnostic SAT at C2 and scored over 100 points lower than when I had just taken the real SAT recently. When I reviewed it later with the tutor, I noticed they had marked almost every answer wrong for the writing section. This was very confusing for me because I usually score near perfect on SAT writing. When I checked the answer key, I was very confident I had actually marked all the right answers. When I requested to see my bubble sheet they claimed to have discarded it. I conclude that they either had a broken scanner or did this on purpose because if diagnostic scores were too high they couldn't convince parents to sign up for their services. Attending C2 also did not help my SAT score at all, and I continuously scored the same over months despite regularly going there. However, as soon as I quit and switched to free online resources and $20 Amazon books I was able to get a 1500+ score with 800 on math with no problem. The C2 test prep books and diagnostic tests are nothing like the real tests, and every student and tutor knows it. The management claims "exact questions" from the C2 tests show up on the real test but that is not true at all. Regarding college essays, I had a very mixed experience. One tutor gave me good feedback and was careful not to change the main points and my personal voice from the essays. However, another one demanded full editing access to my original personal essay document and went ahead and deleted half of it without my consent simply because he couldn't relate to it. He also openly ridiculed my essay and mocked the experiences that I had talked about in it. Overall I would not have come here for essays either and got significantly better feedback from an English teacher at my school for all my essays. The environment in the center is also uncomfortable, with blinding fluorescent lights and they keep the thermostat at 58 degrees, which is not good for focusing. I urge you to send your child to a more affordable tutoring place that genuinely wants your child to grow and succeed, rather than here where they are trying to unethically fool you into spending more money (which actually all goes to
