Today’s tale of parental overachieving is about Debbie Stier, a Westchester mother of two teenagers, who has spent $10,000 prepping for the SATs, which she’s taken seven times in an attempt to get a perfect score, bond with her kids, and presumably land a book deal. “It’s been overwhelming, stressful,” Stier tells the Post, leaving out “self-inflicted.” She adds, “I did feel intimidated. If I felt intimidated as a grown-up, imagine as a teenager.”
Stier’s intense training regimen, which included fifteen hours of studying every week for 46 weeks, is catalogued (and adorably illustrated) on her website Perfect Score Project, including extensive blogging, charts, tips, video dispatches, and more. The Post reports that Stier “prepared with various test services, from online courses like Kaplan to pricey private tutors at Advantage,” but is still 270 points away from a perfect 2400, and struggles especially with math. “How did I put in all of these hours in math and I basically scored the same as in high school?” she wonders.
Still, Stier hired a $250-an-hour private tutor for her son, whose tuition at Fordham Prep is $17,000 annually. On her website, Stier says, “this whole crazy journey started out as a cockamammie [sic] scheme to connect with my son. I thought maybe I could get him interested in this SAT thing if I climbed into the trenches. On that front, I totally scored (though he might never admit this to anyone other than me — but we definitely bonded over the experience).”
If this woman doesn’t use UrbanBaby, I’ll eat every page of a Kaplan study guide.
