BARBRIReviews of barbri.com

Expensive and not properly updated. Tax law is extremely bad taught and not relevant for SQE

Barbri offered a 15% discount on their SQE 1 prep course over this past Black Friday, which I took advantage of. I received emails after my purchase confirming the £200 deposit I paid but not the total amount that would be due in January when the course started. Come to find out that the 'SQE Essentials' bundle was added to my SQE 1 prep somewhere in the purchase process, which is a further £400 before discount that I did not wish to sign up for, but apparently did in error. The additional cost for this was not confirmed to me in email until 4 January. On 5 January I raised the issue that I did not intend to order Essentials and that I had only become aware I had done so when I received an email showing the higher than expected total cost. Barbri declined to cancel the Essentials course, citing a 14-day cooling off period and 'student fairness' as their reason. Barbri is not a school and is not accreditated by any body, and I am not a student, but a paying customer of their self-study prep service. I don't yet have an experience of the quality of their offering, but I am left with the choice of either forefeitting £200 or paying for a course I did not want and have taken elsewhere. After a call and two email exchanges, Barbri has held firm. Be careful of what you buy from this company and be sure to understand the total amount you're paying as Barbri may not communicate it to you until it's too late to 'cool off' (or in my case, simply be aware before any use of the materials that I was about to pay for something I didn't intend to order). I will never use this company again and I would share this story to anyone else who would reasonably expect that a company standing to gain thousands more from me if my experience is positive would be flexible when I state my concerns before the 'course' starts, and not after.

Generally, I find Barbri useful. Early access should open earlier. Customer service is also slow to answer questions via email. Answers to questions in a live format is actually preferred. Most of all, navigation is difficult. It's hard to find information. By the time information is available via email about navigation, I lost my train of thought and focus was broken. Additionally, some of the explanations are incomplete. I would write a more thorough explanation of incomplete explanations, but I cannot remember all of them. There are many.

Content did not adequately cover the bulk of what appeared on the test. Further, the form of practice questions was very different from the form of the test questions, leaving me severely unprepared for the exam as a whole.

Thought SQE1 Barbri course was well managed and thought out. Feel exactly the opposite with the Barbri SQE2 course and would not recommend. The tutors are doing their best and are being very helpful, but the way the course is laid out and the timetabling is confusing. Self-marking exercises are not helpful - although you think you are making the points raised in the exemplars, sometimes the tutors are looking for particular words or phrases, or are looking for the exercise to be set out a certain way, so mark you down when it comes to a tutor-marked exercise. Personally, I think all exercises should be tutor marked so that you know expectations from the outset, then the exemplars provided, preferably at superior performance level. After all, this is what you are working to for your exams! The set-out of the SQE2 course is muddled and ill-thought out. Halfway through the course and Barbi have changed workshop dates so that we are discussing the content and feedback for exercises that are not yet closed. What is the point of discussing how you should have undertaken an exercise BEFORE you have done it??? The timetabling for this course is all over the place which makes it hard to follow and keep up with consistently, especially if you are working full time - which most of my cohort is, currently. Very disappointed after such a great SQE1 Barbri course. Barbri have let themselves down with their SQE2 admin and conduct. Have had to seek extra tutoring outside of Barbri to try and get me through this nightmare.

This flexible course is not flexible, although it is advertised as a ok to do alongside full time work it is really hard to manage due the scheduling of the course. The course material is out of date, full of types and other issues but it’s not being corrected year after year. When material is marked, the reviewers don't seem pay attention marking you down for things they then tell you should be doing. It is cheaper than other courses so there’s that.

Not enough instructions on whats next

The SQE is already an intense course not to mention many of us are working at the same time. I am doing both and have children at home. I have no time to do more than what I am already required to do in terms of preparing for the exams. I find it utterly unprofessional that during my studies, multiple changes have been made to the study guides and we have not been notified about the changes at all. I have to manually check from time to time only to discover that changes have been made, often to material I have already studied so I am forced to unlearn things I already picked up. In one instance, the most recent change was undoing a previous change we were instructed to action. The very least Barbri could do, for both our convenience and sanity, would be to notify students each time amendments are made so that we are not having to check on a daily basis out of panic and fear. It’s such a simple step that could reduce so much additional stress caused purely from the thoughtlessness of not updating students who are already juggling more than enough.