Astroff Consultants Review (Toronto): Prices and an Alternative

What Astroff Consultants is

Astroff Consultants was founded in 2007 by Dr. Robert Astroff, a McGill BA, Dalhousie LLB, Carleton MA and U of T PhD who worked at Foreign Affairs and the United Nations before consulting, and who wrote the book Accepted With Astroff. His co-founder Dorete Astroff is a chartered accountant with a BComm and MAcc. The office is at 5200 Yonge Street in North York. The firm says it has worked with more than 15,000 students and has coached Rhodes Scholars, Loran Scholars and academic gold medallists; its press page lists the Globe and Mail, National Post, Maclean’s, CBC, the Toronto Star and Global. Team size is not published.

The services fall into four groups:

• Academic planning and applications: planning for high-school students, and application and essay review for Canadian, US and international universities, with an undergraduate page of its own.
• Interview preparation in every format professional schools use: MMI, panel, MPI, hybrid, CDA, behavioural (STAR) and what the site calls online video essays.
• Casper training: self-paced courses with simulations and written feedback reports.
• Resume and CV review.

Delivery is one-to-one by phone, video or in person, plus the courses. The centre of gravity is medicine, law, dentistry and MBA: the fifteen or so testimonials on the site are all from professional-school applicants, none from an undergraduate, and Kira Talent, the platform behind most Canadian undergraduate video interviews, is not named anywhere. That is not a criticism, just a description of where the firm’s experience sits.

What Astroff costs

Astroff is one of the few firms in this series that puts prices on the page. The mock-interview bundles and Casper courses on the services page, checked 2 September 2026:

Everything else, academic planning and application and essay review included, is quoted after an intake call. Public reviews are thin: Trustpilot shows 4.3 out of 5 from nine reviews, seven of them five-star and two one-star, one of which, from February 2022, said the paid Casper material was thinner than free resources. Nine reviews is too few to conclude much either way.

AcceptMe, with unlimited timed on-camera interview practice plus the essay coach and the Story Bank, is C$49 a month, and you cancel the month you submit. Two months of it costs less than one individual mock session.

What a $275 mock session can and cannot do for a timed video

A mock interview with a person is the right rehearsal for an MMI or a panel, because those are conversations. An interviewer follows up, probes, notices when you are hedging, and a coach who has watched hundreds of those rehearsals can tell you what a panel will make of you. Astroff has been running that rehearsal for professional-school applicants since 2007, and if that is your interview, the price is on the page and you can judge it.

The interview a Grade 12 faces at Ivey, Sauder, Schulich, Queen’s Commerce or Rotman is not a conversation. It is a camera, an unseen question, a prep window of thirty seconds to a minute, a hard answer clock and no retake. Nobody nods. Nobody softens a question you misheard or prompts you when you stall at forty seconds. A human mock, however good, reacts to you, and that is exactly what the exam will not do, so the rehearsal is not the exam. Then there is the arithmetic. At $275 a session, the Basic bundle buys three sittings. The skill of producing a structured, specific answer on the first take is built over dozens.

The research says the same. In the studies on our research page, an unguided practice run before a recorded video interview changed nothing, tips videos changed nothing, and the group that improved was the one that practiced with an automated interviewer and then read feedback on their own recording. A coach can tell you what a good answer sounds like. Only reps make yours sound like that.

Astroff versus AcceptMe

Where a coach with a doctorate still wins

A consultant who has coached admissions interviews since 2007 can do two things AcceptMe cannot: read your tone and presence in the room, and give you judgement on which programs, which route and how to apply, and for a medical, law or dental applicant that judgement is the whole product. We are honest about both. What a consultant cannot sell is reps, and the skill a timed video interview tests is built by doing it many times with feedback each time. On essays, a review that tells you what a reader will think is worth having; one that rewrites your sentences is putting words in your mouth, and AcceptMe is built to comment and never to rewrite. The founder’s account of why we built AcceptMe is the argument in full.

Who should hire Astroff

• Medical, law, dental or MBA applicants facing an MMI, panel or MPI, who want a coach who has rehearsed that exact format for nearly twenty years and can see the price before booking.
• Undergraduate applicants to nursing or health programs that require Casper, who want a self-paced course with simulations and a written report, from $197.
• Families who want academic planning from a firm with a long public record and a founder whose credentials are on the page.

Who should use AcceptMe instead, or as well

• Students whose application includes a timed video interview, a timed written answer or a supplementary essay, at any school in any country, who know where they are applying and need to get good at the assessment itself.
• Families for whom $275 a sitting is out of reach, or who can see that three sittings is not enough for a first-take-only exam. A month of the coach costs less than one session.
• Clients of Astroff, or any consultant, who want to arrive at each paid hour having already recorded and reviewed their answers, so the hour goes on judgement rather than on rehearsal.

Start with the Kira practice guide if your program uses a timed video, then the STAR method examples for the behavioural questions Astroff and every other coach will drill you on. The Canadian admissions coaching comparison puts Astroff next to the other firms, and the admissions consultant fees guide has every published and reported price in one place. Prepskills is the other Toronto firm that publishes every price, and the consultants-by-city guide has the rest of the map. Then record an answer tonight and read the coach’s notes before deciding whether you still need the session.