Prepskills Review (Toronto): Prices, and What They Do Not Sell

What Prepskills is

Prepskills was founded in 2002 by Joanna Severino, who holds a B.Comm and a B.Ed and is an Ontario Certified Teacher, and operates from 2657 Yonge Street at Yonge and Eglinton. The site says more than 20,000 students have been admitted with its help. It is, first, a test-prep company, and second, a consultancy for two specific routes:

• Test preparation: SSAT for private-school entry, and SAT and ACT for US colleges, sold as courses.
• US college consulting: strategy, essays and, in the site’s words, interviewing techniques, sold in blocks of hours, plus the PrepUSCollege programs and a US College Expo.
• Private-school admissions consulting: retainers for families applying to independent schools.

What we could not find on the site, checked 1 September 2026, is a Canadian-university admissions product: nothing for the Ontario supplementary applications, nothing for a timed video interview, nothing for the UBC Personal Profile. If that changes, this page will be updated. Public reviews are modest for a firm of its age, around twenty-five on Yelp.

What Prepskills costs

Prepskills publishes every price, which almost nobody in this industry does, and the transparency is worth saying out loud before anything else. The consulting prices on the site as of 1 September 2026:

So the entry point for consulting is two hours for $1,795, and an interview is one topic among several inside those hours. 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. A whole application season comes to a small fraction of the two-hour block.

The format Prepskills leaves uncovered is the timed one

For the student it is built for, the Prepskills model makes sense. A US application is a judgement problem for most of its length: which schools, which test, how to sequence early decision, what a Common App essay is for. Twenty hours with someone who has done it since 2002 is a reasonable way to buy that judgement, and the price is on the page.

A Canadian application with a supplementary component is a different shape. Ivey, Queen’s Commerce, Schulich, Rotman and Sauder put you in front of a camera with an unseen question, a short prep window and a hard answer clock; Waterloo and McMaster add timed or word-limited written answers. Those are performance problems, and the skill they test is produced on the first take, with no interviewer to nod or prompt. Interviewing techniques discussed in a consulting hour prepare you for a person across a table, which none of these formats involve. A firm with no Canadian-university product has, by definition, no practice for them.

The research on our research page explains why techniques on their own do not move the needle: 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 its own recording. A consultant can tell you what a good answer sounds like. Only reps make yours sound like that.

Prepskills versus AcceptMe

Where twenty-plus years of judgement beats a tool

A consultant who has sent students to US colleges since 2002 can do two things AcceptMe cannot: read your tone and presence in the room, and give you judgement on a US or private-school strategy, which is a genuinely different game with its own tests, deadlines and essays. We are honest about both, and if that is your route, Prepskills is a real option with the price in front of you. What a consultant cannot sell is reps, and the skill a timed video interview or a timed written answer tests is built by doing it many times with feedback each time. On essays, avoid any service, human or software, that rewrites your sentences; that 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 Prepskills

• Students applying to US colleges who want SAT or ACT prep and application strategy from one Toronto firm with published prices and a long record.
• Families applying to independent schools who need the SSAT and someone who knows the private-school admissions process.
• Anyone who wants to see every price before a single conversation, and would rather pay for a block of hours than sit through a sales call.

Who should use AcceptMe instead, or as well

• Students whose list is Ivey, Queen’s, Waterloo, Sauder or any other program with a video interview, a timed written answer or a supplementary essay, at any school in any country. That is not what Prepskills sells, and it is exactly what AcceptMe is for.
• Families for whom a two-hour block at $1,795 is out of reach. A season of the coach costs a small fraction of it.
• Clients of Prepskills, 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. A US-bound student with a Canadian safety that has a supplementary can run both.

Start with the hub guide to every Ontario supplementary application, which lists which programs interview on camera and which set written answers, then the Kira practice guide for the routine. The admissions coaching comparison table lines Prepskills up against the firms that do sell Canadian admissions help, and the admissions consultant cost guide collects every published and reported price. Astroff Consultants is the other Toronto firm with a full public price list, and it does sell Canadian interview prep; the consultants-by-city guide covers the rest of the region. Then record an answer tonight and read the coach’s notes.