"I was a teaching assistant for [Harvard] Summer School Physics 1b and have over 300 hours experience teaching with PBHA Chinatown ESL," Yang added.

"A peer-led review program seemed like a natural idea," Chan wrote in an e-mail message. "The best educational resources are not found at some commercial site but lie right here on campus."

To date, SCOPE's classes have succeeded with the low-cost, student-taught model.

"So far the program has been going strong," Chan said. "About 30 undergrads are currently enrolled."

Biological Sciences 15 and Physical Science 15, which meet for two hours twice a week, are both in their fourth week. The classes will prepare the students to take the MCAT on April 17.

Chukwuemeka C. Nwanze '00, a student currently enrolled in the SCOPE classes, picked them over other test-prep organizations because "SCOPE is cheaper and hopefully will be sufficient," Nwanze wrote in an e-mail message, adding that the course has helped her review old material.

"It seemed to me that many students were feeling pressured into taking such courses, either because they perceive them to be necessary for an adequate preparation (which they're not), or because they think `everybody else' is taking them," Chan wrote.

But high stress levels and the enormous costs of some test-prep programs have caused some students to question whether the MCAT is too important a factor in medical school admissions, especially because expensive preparation courses promise higher scores.

"I think standardized testing tends to be biased toward those with more opportunity. People with more resources and access to materials are more likely to do better," Man wrote in an e-mail message.

"I think the standardized test is a necessary evil, but I would hope that less emphasis would be placed on it," he added.

Nwanze, though, said that the test is particularly appropriate for testing scientific knowledge.

Tests like the MCAT "are a test of knowledge of a specific set of information, and some might argue that for the science topics covered there is no other way short of lab to test this knowledge," Nwanze wrote.