Debbie Stier

Debbie Stier took the SAT seven times – as an adult – to crack the hype surrounding the test and motivate her son to study and boost his scores. The result: her son scored in the 95 percentile and received multiple offers from top-ranking colleges with significant scholarship money attached. Stier and her book about the experience, The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT, have been featured on NBC’s Today Show, CBS This Morning, Daily Ticker on Yahoo Finance, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Parade Magazine (twice), The Huffington Post, the Harvard Crimson, USA Today, The Journal News, and Gotham Gal. Stier is a contributor to Time.com about the SAT, as well as Psychology Today.

From an unbiased perspective, Stier offers different keynote speeches and workshops for parents, teachers, guidance counselors, educators, high school students, and corporate lunch and learn programs that are game-changers for SAT prep. She has delivered talks at a range of venues: high schools, PTA groups, SXSW, Media Bistro, Columbia University, and NYU. Her talks are not only a bottomless well of information about how to get the best possible SAT score, but they offer a funny and moving story of how she bonded with her son during the SAT journey.

Every year three million students take the SAT, the college admissions exam that looms large for most high school juniors and seniors in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. To break through the hype surrounding the test and understand what it really takes to succeed, Debbie Stier took the SAT seven times in one year and “went to school” for standardized testing – an exercise in both hilarity and heartbreak. With a straight-from-the-trenches road map of everything parents, students, and educators need to know about SAT prep, she covers topics such as:

When do I start? Do the brand-name test prep services really deliver? Which should I go with: a tutor, an SAT class, or self study? How do I find the right tutor? Does test location really matter? How do SAT scores affect merit aid? What’s the one thing about the test I absolutely need to know?