Activity

Mr. Wainner is entitled to his opinion, however no review course on the LARE or any other professional licensing exam is ever free to the candidates. The ASLA, various extension programs, and many state chapter charge fees for live or web-based reviews. In the past, CLARB charged serious fees for study aids including “The Road to Licensure” and practice exams.
A review course for 10-30 students must have a venue. These cost several hundred dollars per day. In addition, if the course is to be truly worthwhile, considerable preparation effort is necessary on the part of the presenters for their lectures, organizational work and marketing, and study materials, not to mention their actual class time.
I spend dozens of hours every exam period working to update and extend the material I present in the Freeman & Jewell LARE Reviews. Just as an example: My section 4 course includes 25 hours of class time, 465 pages of indexed, printed and bound study material, and 208 practice questions and answers including AIT type graphic problems. There are 22 Powerpoint slide shows comprising 470 individual slides in this class alone. Also included is e-mail support after the class for at least 30 days. Coffee, tea and other refreshments, as well as snacks are also included. A wide range of reference materials is brought to the classes for students to review first hand to aid them in determining whether purchasing CLARB recommended references or study guides sold by other entities such as PPI might be of use.
Each year I present a pro bono 2 hour overview and Q&A session for the Northern California ASLA Chapter in San Francisco. I also regularly answer candidate questions here on Land 8 as well as other LARE discussion boards.
What Mr. Wainner is referring to in his work sounds like mentoring candidates on the exam. I wonder if he does any homework prior to doing this? Does he hand out prep materials? Are there any practice questions?
The classes I offer are a professional service, with constantly updated powerpoints and printed materials. While on the surface the classes may seem expensive, I seriously doubt that any other LARE review available offers as much bang for the buck. One of the better features of my courses is the delivery of a comprehensive package of study materials assembled in one document. The standard references listed by CLARB can be overwhelming, and many students are at a loss as to where to begin. In addition, the exam is not school, nor is it practice at an agency or office. It has it’s own dynamic, which can be very disconcerting to the candidates. I spend much class time discussing “the CLARB way” of correctly parsing questions and available answers.
In short, I don’t feel that I am “taking advantage” of candidates at all. In fact, the last reorganization of the exam in 2012 took 100s of hours of effort to reformat and reorganize my materials due to the change from vignettes to AITs and the fairly random moving around of subject matter into the numbered exam sections.