This is a nice place.Wonderful tutors helping students get ahead and make sure that they get their test Very nice building.apleajty of parking read more

My youngest went to Ivymax's Nepal camp during winter break and I can't recommend it more. It's super organized and the kids spend their time doing humanitarian aid. During their down time, they also have college application seminars to attend, so the kids make the most of their break time. Usually during high school time, they don't have as much time to spend thinking about extra-curriculars, so I would say these summer and winter trips are great for that! Costa Rica Trip 1 read more

One of the things I learned while preparing my college applications was that they were looking for well-rounded people with unique experiences, as well as altruistic people who want to improve the communities they live in. So being able to go to Ningxia and help the villagers there was a very interesting and welcome prospect. I complain a lot when I'm living at home, but I learned a lot about how people with much less than I have can also have lives just as happy as mine. I really appreciate Ivymax for the opportunity to try to help the less fortunate, and to help myself appreciate my own life. read more

My previous review is still valid, but ivymax must have listened to my review. 2 days later, they fired the inadequate teachers and 2 PhDs to take on the class who are extremely skilled in educating. In addition, they even extended the class by 2 days to cover the time lost with the old teacher. I am impressed, fellow yelpers, always voice your concerns. It goes a long way. read more

Wonderful service at Cupertino. Learning a lot from the seminar last week about EA/ED and the 2018 application information. read more

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My child was with ivymax for three years and our experience was not good. Our senior counselor watches her hours and was not genuinely care about providing a good service. We were given two junior writers and had to really complains before giving a good one. read more

Eldest went to Ningxia with Ivymax. Honestly, best summer spent yet! Trip was packed with hands on activities. She went as part of micro finance P2P group and she got to interview rural farmers and experience their way of life. The student groups had the responsibility to conduct a financial analysis of candidates and pick the best candidate for a loan. Trip not only helped daughter but also the rural economy. This trip also helped daughter strengthen her Mandarin skills as all the interviews of the villagers are done in Mandarin (of course). She got to experience a totally different culture and environment. China is not all uniform and she really saw that through Ningxia. All in all great opportunity! Definitely recommend!!! read more

This is very expensive place. In fact, the student and teacher ratio is too high. Considering this fact, the price is really expensive. In addition, the AMC math teacher is not nice to the students. Many times in a class, he yelled to the students. My son was very uncomfortable with this Chinese math teacher. It was very disappointing that this expensive place hires the low-qualified teacher for this important class to the students and the parents. I do not recommend this place and class to anybody. Very disappointed! read more

PLEASE DON'T go here. It's terrible. Notice: this is review is based on cold, hard, facts. IvyMax, if you try to edit my review, I will sue you. We got one kid in IvyMax. Now we are really regretting that we ever did that. To make them even "help" us, we paid a hefty chunk of cash ($$$$$). It all went to waste. The one in Pleasanton is even worse. We paid the same amount of cash, only to get worse service. IvyMax is a trick to get you to spend big bucks. The first problem is SAT. The teachers barely even bothered to correct my child's test, and didn't help to get to my kid's goal. IvyMax's slogan is "Will help your children to get to his/her dream college". They couldn't even handle SAT, much less "dream college". IvyMax is a terrible place to get help for college essays. The people working there will barely even edit your essay. They will leave it to your kid. Conclusion: TERRIBLE AT EVERYTHING THEY OFFER. read more

I've gone to several different places touting college advice and test prep classes, but this place was undoubtedly the worst. Not only do they cheat you out of your money, the classes are mediocre at best. The SAT Reasoning classes for CR and Writing probably best serve those who are not native English speakers and need rote memorization to even be able to compete with native English speakers on the test. As for people who actually want to increase their score and have gone through the American education system, this place is useless for you. The teachers are all condescending and rude that even a test prep book is nicer and more personal. Perhaps the classes just weren't my style, so my rating isn't completely based on this. What really bothered me is that they scam you out of your money. They had a promotional deal that offered a $1000 reward to anyone who took their class and received at least a 2300 on the SAT. Despite being assured that this deal was legitimate, they claimed that I did not fill out some kind of form, and I was therefore ineligible for the reward. No mention of this form despite the multiple times we inquired about the reward. I also know another family that was so dissatisfied by their college counseling service that they wrote a 3-4 page letter of complaint. Spend your money elsewhere or be smart and just prepare for your SAT tests by yourself. They're becoming more and more obsolete anyway. There are many quality test prep centers in the area. We're pretty famous for it. Really it doesn't matter where you go, more the effort you put in, so don't waste your money. If your kid is destined for an Ivy League school, this place won't help. The statistics don't mean squat. Smart kids who have parents that think they'll be better with classes are forced into this place and score well even though they probably could have done just as well without the classes. read more

We came to IvyMax for the first time when my daughter was in seventh grade. I found their counseling team both experienced and cooperative. They understood the classes and summer activities at her school very well. During the last two years, their club manager was able to lead my daughter through a water management research project in the desert. During this experience, my daughter wrote multiple essays to challenge a Stanford professor's thesis. We never expected for her to attend Stanford after that! This exceeded all of my expectations for what a summer camp could accomplish. I'm very appreciative. read more

My sister's older daughter started took the honors chemistry, physics, and SAT I preparation class here at IvyMax when she was in tenth grade. She improved 300 points on the SAT I. IvyMax's class manager is very detailed and pays close attention to the students' progress. They make sure parents are kept up to date with their children's progress in both class and homework. Also, class sizes are kept small so teachers can work closely with each and every student. Be aware that the class manager will take all cell phones before each class. Her younger daughter took college application planning courses here, and Ivymax helped her enroll in a summer camp at Stanford. I am very satisfied with the help both my daughters received. read more

Lots of resources available here. It's a little pricy though. Private tutors and prep courses are available for students. For the prep courses, students have to be self-driven. Very easy to fall behind; going to class alone isn't enough. Students must study (a lot) additionally at home to benefit most from these course. read more

I sent my son to IvyMax, he got a lot helps over there. IvyMax has professional, considerate and top-grade quality of services, especially when the students encountered difficulties or met some issues on the way towards their dreaming colleges. IvyMax's consular team always gave students help in their quick responding (including comment, ideas, strategies and/or solutions). I appreciate IvyMax consular team's great help for my son and IvyMax's professional service as a whole. read more

My son joinned to IvyMax from last two years. He became to a very mature student. Not only on his GPA but also on his personality. He did many community activities which orginized by IvyMax student club every month. The counselor here has much experience to motivate students. He got much more motivation on learning and studying than before. I really appreciate to the counselor and all the teachers in IvyMax.They always follow up students progress situation. I think this is a good place and comfortable learning environment. read more

My son went to Nepal trip this summer and he really enjoyed it... Before this camp, he never really saw any region with higher poverty rate, so it was big surprise... haha! I think these camps are really good for especially teens because they get to experience a lot of new things and help them mature. Although he had a hard time adjusting to Nepalese way of life and living without his high speed internet's and video games and other electronics haha!, he still ended up having a good time! He bonded with new friends, the old-fashioned way, face to face! Ivymax really makes sure that the kids have many chances to make new friends so they don't get homesick, which is good because my son is more shy... I also like ivymax balances fun activities with learning and service work!... I think service work is really a great character builder. Sadly my son didn't have much chance before this trip to do service activity. However this trip really open his eyes..., and he came back with lots of stories to share and feels motivate to do something to help others after seeing how hard life is for the villagers. Anyways from my son experience, I really recommend this trip for any parents with teenagers. Your teenagers will get great opportunities to meet new friends and do something meaningful with their summer! read more

After some consideration with my wife , we signed our children to Ivymax's college application program. We both went to college a long time ago, so our experiences are completely out of date, especially in today's competitive schooling environment. We really wanted to give our children the best shot possible for getting into the schools of their dreams, so we decided to look into the college prep programs. Honestly, there were so many of them out there so we had such a hard time with the overwhelming amount of possibilities, but we finally settled on Ivymax because they have a really high success rate. A huge amount of their previous students went on to Ivy Leagues and top UCs! Especially in the Bay Area, where the high schools are super competitive, Ivymax ended up helping our kids go into the schools they wanted. They give HANDS-ON mentoring with really experience college counselors. My children already have a lot of interests and their own ideas, but their college counselors at Ivymax helped them CHANNEL those interests into beneficial clubs that they enjoyed, and that helped them in their college applications. They really know their stuff; my youngest's strongpoint is math, so Ivymax helps her prepare for AMC and AIME exams. (They have a whole bunch of supplementary classes and tutors for that). They also have a college essay writing camp that help guides students to pick the best ideas for their essays and presents the best strategies and examples of good essays. After my kids wrote their essays, they met weekly with college essay editors to perfect the essays. I whole-heartedly recommend Ivymax!! They REALLY know what they're doing. Any way to give my kids a leg-up, I'd say is a definite YES. read more

Helen, who taught grammar and critical reading was decent, but otherwise IvyMax was a huge waste of money. The people who run the place are also condescending if you do not do very well the SAT diagnostic test you take before you start classes, especially if you do poorly on math. The online vocabulary and grammar was by far the biggest waste of time. There were a lot of mistakes in the online grammar practice and it is very easy to blindly guess the vocab answers since it is multiple choice. read more

I did not know high school applications were something that existed until my son came home one day with a recommendation letter from his counselor. Obviously, I did not even know where to start. i saw an IvyMax pamphlet at a friend's house and figured it couldn't hurt to call and ask for a counselor. That turned out to be the best idea I could've had. He never lost patience as my son and I fumbled our way when the counselor helped my very shy son write an essay detailing his excellent personality. And at the end of it, he was accepted into three of schools we applied to, which makes me very satisfied with the level of service that I received. read more

A warning to prospective parents: consider ALL SAT prep classes before making a deposit. IvyMax filtered my review, so I'm posting it again. Hopefully, IvyMax's intention is to give their customers a good introspection into their services, but I seriously doubt that now they took such lengths to hide my review from curious customers. If IvyMax truly cared about its customers, it would not care about bad reviews, but instead reflect on their mistakes. My review is made with honest, true facts, not harsh opinions. As a student, I am not satisfied with IvyMax's current services. It took more than a week to get the first test back in comparison to other SAT prep classes where it only takes a day for students to receive their scores. Furthermore, upon receiving the test, we were told to stay extended periods of time to go over errors and learn from our mistakes. This proved extremely painstaking and ineffective as much of the time was spent explaining a few problems in unnecessary detail and skimming over the rest. Mistakenly, this institution does not respect the time that students dedicate to the class. The teaching strategies are incredibly monotonous. Specifically, the SAT boot camp they provide is very boring. Teachers are unable to keep students engaged and listening. Also, instead of actually teaching the material, they constantly give out tests, tests, and more tests to force improvements on the students, with little success. It works if the tests are given on occasion but everyday? No. I understand that students only have one month to learn the material and there is only so much that a teacher can do, but the lack of interaction between teacher and student makes learning almost impossible. The students get handed out packets to read; little is done to ensure completion of this task, and test averages suffer. Heavy grade curves are a familiar concept to give the illusion of success from the tests that students are endlessly burdened with. We only have two hours to learn the material and do practice exercises, yet we spend the first majority of class doing the test and the second half correcting. After a couple of weeks, the teacher became too lazy to print out the handouts for the students, instructing the students to watch their email inboxes for the homework. This proves the lack of responsibility of the teacher. The correction is not helpful either since the teacher rarely goes into depth about a question. When the teacher does decide to explain more about the question, he does not know when to stop, wasting up to half an hour on a simple sentence improvement problem. The teacher also admits to not reading what he assigns us, prevent him from providing any help to many of the students that have trouble comprehending the more advanced texts. Without any further discussion, a quiz is immediately administered as soon as class starts, forcing students to enter the test with extreme confusion at times. A test should challenge concepts learned in class, not test simple memorization. Honestly, I feel that students themselves correct the tests because the teacher does not what to correct the tests himself. Also student confidentiality is nearly nonexistent as he even had us announce our peers scores out loud to the class one time. His reasoning was because he did not have enough time to do it later on, leading one to suspect the legitimacy of his commitment. Essays are also large weak points of many of the students. With essay scores averaging at 2-3 out of 6, many of us were at first optimistic at the amount of writing he assigned us. This later proved to be a false hope since the essays were graded at a sluggish pace with minimal, confusing feedback, or just simply graded by other students. If he does not want to correct them, why does he give so much work to the students? Are teachers not supposed to put in an equal amount of work as the students? At the beginning of the program, he printed out large packets of work for the students to complete, but as time went on, students were told to print out the assignments themselves, further proving the teacher's lack of responsibility to tend to the class. Currently, problems associated with SAT diagnostic scoring gives the illusion that students are doing poorer than they are. We pay a large amount of money to only get mediocre services. I do not understand why they think they're so prestigious: they fool customers by plastering thank you letters from past graduates of IvyMax. Yet, if everybody is supposedly going to an ivy league school, why am i not learning anything? read more

I would not recommend this place to people. Pro: High level counselors and instructors are professional. Con:But many regular counselers act like car salesman, NOTprofessional at all, not ethical. They are expensive!!! They might insult you sometimes -said thing like if you don't have money.... They like to do business verbally. They like verbal contract, or written contract with min. details. This way, something goes wrong, they can simply deny. If you negotiated price for certain services, the day you came for service - price might change if you did not make they write it down. Kids were doing outside school activities and helping non Asians. They questioned our kid why want to help other races? Just some experiences we encountered while we were there last year. read more

Here's a bit of background about my relationship with IvyMax. I've attended their college counseling from 10th to 12th grade. I went to one of their international summer camps. I attended their SAT class. I've gone through the entire college application process with one of the editors. I'll touch on each aspect one by one. College planning: College planning is basically ensuring that you will have a competitive college application. They will get you started on taking the SAT early, which is helpful. They will tell you to take the SAT II Chemistry test when you just finished taking Chemistry Honors. They will tell you "by the end of high school, you should ideally have taken X number of SAT IIs and scored above 750 on all if you want to get into this university." They will give you SAT II practice tests to take in preparation. They will recommend more clubs and extracurriculars you can join if they find you lacking (and they probably will). They probably know about clubs that you don't even know about in your high school. They will push you to challenge yourself and take more AP courses. This sort of college planning is helpful if you are ambitious, but need guidance from someone who thoroughly understands the college application process. This sort of college planning is helpful if you have a tendency to procrastinate and need help staying on top of things. This sort of college planning is NOT helpful for someone who cracks under extreme pressure or lacks mental fortitude. You have to have the self-confidence and strength to understand that you are not a failure, despite hearing "Why aren't you taking 7 APs instead of 6?" or "Little Johny is already taking community college classes and you aren't" or "You need to join more clubs" or "Vice President? Why aren't you President?" etc. I understand that the people who send their kids to IvyMax are high achieving and have accomplished a lot. After all, those who emigrated out of China are generally the best and brightest. But this doesn't mean your child can handle that lifestyle without emotional trauma. Carefully think about whether or not your child is capable of going through 4 years of extreme stress and pressure. Making the wrong choice has heavy real-life consequences. Do you want your child to dread school? Do you want your child to have a mental illness? Do you want your child to end up in the hospital for suicidal tendencies? This happens. Look at the Gunn High School statistics. 1 in roughly 8 students contemplated suicide. In less than one school year, 42 students ended up hospitalized. Summary: They do the job, but the counseling is very rigorous. This isn't for everyone. International Summer Camp: The international summer camp was basically a two-week trip that is supposed to sound impressive on your resume. I personally think it's a waste of money. Yes, you learn stuff and it's a fun experience. But no, it isn't that amazing on a college application. What could make it amazing, if is you do something more with it. It will look amazing if you took the knowledge you learned, and after the trip made real life impacts by starting a project or fundraiser. One thing I must harshly criticize IvyMax for is encouraging bullying. Instead of rooming with another student, I was roomed with a teacher. This might not sound bad but this was effectively social exclusion, which is a form of bullying. Everyone else had the opportunity to develop really close friendships with someone their age but I did not. Summary: It's what you make of it, but realistically speaking, for 90% of people it isn't worth it. SAT class: An excellent class. It had a lot of useful information that helped me on my SAT. But the class shouldn't be the only thing you do. Practice, learn from your mistakes, and repeat the process 30 times. I scored a 2350 out of 2400 on my first test. Summary: Worth it, but you can't solely rely on it. College application and admissions counseling: This service is basically helping you pick what colleges you should apply to, narrow down your college list, brainstorm essays, edit essays, and edit the application itself. It was highly useful. The whole application process is kind of daunting and it's always helpful to have a someone else's input. Plus, they help you stay on top of things so that you aren't writing 20 essays the week of Christmas. This is very worth it if you have a tendency to procrastinate or if English isn't your forte or if you are unfamiliar with US colleges. Everyone has something to gain from this and I recommend it if you have the money. This process helps you shine through on the applications. This process DOES NOT mean that you automatically get into Harvard. If you have a 2.0 GPA, and no AP classes or extracurriculars, even the perfect essay won't get you in. Summary: Will help you get into slight reach schools, but won't help you get into extreme reach schools. read more

First off, I want to give a shout-out to the Cupertino Ivymax's employees. They really work hard to help out the students and care about the students' well-being above-and-beyond their job. If you need any help regarding SAT class prep, definitely ask for Jason Xiao. He's in charge of that and knows all the tips and tricks. Shout-outs to Katie Wang, Jun Yin, and Isabel Lee as well! They were there to answer all my questions and concerns! Ivymax's classes are great, but I'd say that their SAT prep program and their college application package are the best options. Their SAT teacher, Helen, is a Harvard graduate and has been teaching the SAT for years. Self-studying for the SAT wasn't doing my kids any good, especially since they have a lot of work from their high school, so they had a tough time finding time to review. Ivymax's classes assign homework SAT problems and assign actual previous tests, so students couldn't be better prepared! They teach all the strategies and review the problems with students so they learn from their errors. Ivymax also has a ton of students who scored extremely highly on the SAT (which is one of the reasons I picked them over other test prep centers). Their college application seminars are also so helpful. Since they have helped so many students already, they have a lot of data on what works and what doesn't. read more

My son took creative writing class in Cupertino center. this class is really important if you want to do better at your essays. I thought creative writing was for people who wanted to be fiction authors later,but it turns out there's more to it than that. We read poems and analyze meanings from it, and it helped me to be come a better reader and conversationalist because now I'm thinking about what people mean instead of just the surface level of what they say. read more

My Daughter Angela joined the creative writing course in IvyMax since grade 8, teacher Steven is very helpful and professional in writing. She enjoyed to work with Steven and having fun in creative writing. My daughter's writing improved a lot and she began to love writing. I strongly recommend you this creative writing course in IvyMax. read more

This is very bad place. In fact, the student and teacher ratio is too high. Considering this fact, the price is really expensive. In addition, the teacher is not responsible to the students. The teachers ignore students when they need help. My kids was very uncomfortable with the teachers at IvyMax. It was very disappointing that this expensive place hires the low-qualified teachers. I do not recommend this place and class to anybody. Very disappointed! read more

I recently took IvyMax's 2018 public speaking class with Ivan Temes and I was not impressed. First of all the students were out of control and the teacher for 1/6 of the class was trying to calm everybody down. Secondly, the parent who stays in the back is always being a pain saying things that the teacher just said and recommending things that are completely unnecessary such as do something about the topic which is not the right thing to do. Finally the teacher kept repeating and repeating his own past experiences and he also kept giving the same feedback so there was not much learning going on. read more

Do not go to this facility. This place robs your children of their dreams and money. The head counselor their told me to give up the things I loved to do because colleges don't care about them. I was told to quit my school marching band, volleyball team, and many honors clubs such as CSF and NHS. The counselor has no idea what she's talking about because these are extracurricular activities that colleges do definitely look into and show growth and commitment as a high school student. Unless you want your child to be miserable, do not go to this facility. read more