MCE is Mandatory Continuing Education – something your TREC licensed Realtor has to pretend to do every two years or so to keep their license current. For the last few years, these courses have been given away completely free.
Rather than ponying up $75 for a course and sit in a sweaty room with a bunch of real estate agents trying to peer at the instructor over the beehives and bouffant barnets for 3 to 8 hours, you can now go online and knock them out. Free.
The traditional training model is that vendors will cough up some lunch and defray some of the instructor expenses so that they have the pleasure of wheeling some heavily made-up sorority girl in front of you in a dark business suit and vying for your business while you learn. Free cookies and coffee are not unheard of in the race to win your business as your mind dribbles out from one ear.
The new model is that you sit in front of a PC following some ninja “practically illegal black hat” SEO techniques have lead you to free MCE courses. They used to be timed, so that you had to sit for 3 hours tapping a mouse and confirming that you were still who you said you were, rather than a college student in a training-shop in Bangladesh answering the questions for you.
Now it’s pretty nifty. I managed to complete two 3 hour courses in 72 minutes over lunch time while cooking and eating a chicken in a tomato and basil sauce over rice. Granted, the sauce and rice were pre-prepared but I did have to cook the chicken and heat things concurrently.
The 72 minutes included signing up and registering for the courses too, so it’s not a bad investment in time. I’d be willing to pay $75 for getting three hours of my life back, not having to talk to a room full of realtors and not having to drive anywhere in this tarmac furnace. But it’s free, so I don’t have to.
So are the questions hard? Could you pay a 5th grader to take the course for you? I think the second is a little unethical, though the questions are facile. Even the “are you still there, and are you Joe Bloggs?” questions are multiple choice. Hard to go wrong really.
Unless you want to actually learn something new that is.
I think they’re trying to lure you into doing the other 12 hours of required courses with them too, given that you could probably knock it out in about two hours. If you decide you want to do that, put in this coupon code, and you’ll probably get something off the price:
“Just go to www.1FreeCE.com and type in my referral code 6R6R0917 into the Promotion Code box when ordering to receive this $15 savings!”
Oh and I think I win a trip to Mars if 10 people put in my referral code or something. Without the space ship.
Update: it looks like they’re now out of business in 2014 – off that – giving away free courses all the time. You can get 3 free hours here: http://www.003freemcehours.com
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I use this MCE trick all the time. I get cheap training that I can get a monkey to do on my behalf. Not a real monkey of course. A real estate monkey
I just took the TREC Ethics class – a 3 hour class in 47 minutes, and that included a sandwich and a glass of water in the office kitchen. I love these courses. Oh, that’s not my real name by the way
I just had three beers – good beers mind you – and finished my ethics course in under 31 minutes. This represents a personal best on both accounts.