When it comes to the SATs, you can’t pay to win — just ask the Westchester mom who doled out $10,000 trying to get a perfect score.
After taking the dreaded test seven times and spending thousands in prep services, Debbie Stier is still 270 points shy of 2400.
“It’s been overwhelming, stressful,” Stier, 46, said. “I did feel intimidated. If I felt intimidated as a grown-up, imagine as a teenager.”
The former publishing executive and mother of a Fordham Prep junior took the SAT exam every time it was offered in 2011. She prepared with various test services, from online courses like Kaplan to pricey private tutors at Advantage.
“How did I put in all of these hours in math and I basically scored the same as in high school?” she said, after studying an average of 15 hours a week for 46 weeks.
Her point, she said, is that the test-prep services that are now a booming industry aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
She began tracking her progress online, calling her Web site the Perfect Score Project.
It was a way for Stier to connect with her son Ethan, who had also been stressing over the test. In addition to paying Fordham Prep’s $17,000 tuition, Stier hired a private tutoring service at $250 an hour to improve her son’s score.
Stier has criticized online courses like Kaplan, Khan Academy and Grockit.
She says Kaplan is riddled with typos and glitches and is slow to return analysis results. She claims it took her almost two days to sign into the online Grockit, and called Khan Academy a “navigational nightmare.”
Kaplan’s executive director of marketing, Jieun Choe, said, “As we are continuously looking to improve, we appreciate Debbie’s feedback regarding font and spacing concerns, submission glitches and e-mail concerns, and are investigating.”
A rep for Khan Academy admitted that “we’re definitely not perfect and [are] trying to improve the user experience,” and added that the site is “undergoing a major overhaul as we speak.”
Grockit didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Stier concedes she did improve in the verbal section compared to her high-school days, from 390 to 760. But on the math section, she rose only from 480 to 570.
She also got a perfect 800 in writing — a relatively new section of the test she didn’t face in high school.
Ethan, who has taken only one SAT test so far, trumped his mom in math by 130 points, scoring a 700.