Prepscholar

How I rue the day I chose PrepScholar from the many options available to improve my daughter's somewhat-disappointing SAT score. I ignored little alarm bells. To take one example, their offerings page says "We recommend at least +/-40 hours of study before your test." Plus or minus forty hours? These are the language experts? Second example, my daughter had already scored a 750 on the language part of the SAT. That's in the 99th percentile. But PrepScholar's "SAT Diagnostic Report" showed her language skills somewhere below the 50th percentile. That's a BIG difference, and should have been the end of our involvement. But the idea of a website that finds your academic level and gives you work tuned to your exact needs was very appealing, so we stuck with it.

Well, my daughter did exactly what PrepScholar recommended, exceeding the recommended 40 hours of study. Result? Her language score went DOWN 30 points. Her overall SAT score went up exactly 10 points. Just taking the test again, with no preparation, would almost certainly have shown at least a 10 point improvement.

What about PrepScholar's "160-Point Guarantee"? Read the fine print. Very few folks will meet all those conditions. I asked for my money back anyway, and the answer was, predictably, "no".