Sara by Ray Dass is absolutely awful. It's very tedious and time consuming making the student spent an inordinate amount of time crunching numbers and figures without actually teaching them or learning anything.
The course is simple enough. You get different sections that are tuned to your scholastic level. So if you're in Algebra 1, you get Algebra 1 and earlier questions going back to arithmetic. If you're in Geometry, you get Geometry and earlier. If you're in Junior English, you get Junior English level stuff and earlier. Whatever level you're in you get your current level and all previous scholastic levels down to the most basic. Sounds like a good review that builds on itself right? Wrong.
You get a video at the beginning of each section with some boring white guy who drones on and on and on about the topic. If you want that then Khan Academy is better, much better. Honestly just watching videos is not the best though. As we have seen with online school through the COVID pandemic, it's not that good and even before corona, videos only work for a very motivated student who wants to fill in the gaps on one particular topic they feel they need to enrich and research in the moment not as a general approach.
The questions themselves are a lot of work but you spend a lot of time just crunching them and not really learning anything. After having done many different test prep books and even a few online courses for most of the national tests through the years these questions are very generic and cover the topics broadly but don't have the style, personality or signature of any of the national tests ranging from the high school entrance exams to the actual SAT/ACT's as well.
What really makes Ray Dass Sara very time inefficient is that there are no answers or explanations to the questions that help the student learn from their mistakes or analyze their approach. If you get just a handful wrong, you have to restart the WHOLE section without even knowing what your mistake might have been. Unfortunately the software never tells you what your mistake was or teaches you so you have to restart from scratch. If you make too many mistakes it "flags your account". So you're spending a lot of time just trying to self analyse your own progress to see what/how you got wrong because the software won't even tell you! This is valuable time you could be using to do more questions. It's so tedious and boring and mind numbing that you could spend 1/2 the time you waste on Ray Dass on any of the reputable books (Barron's, Kaplan, Princeton, Kumon to mention a few) on your test of choice which each cost a pittance on Amazon. That time would be far better spent learning the strategies, question types, approaches and most importantly having answer keys with detailed explanation that help the student gain feedback from their experience so they can raise their score.
It's almost as if Ray Dass or whoever owns this designed it around a price or profit point not going the extra mile to make it easy or worthwhile for the student to spend their time or money on it. Agree with the other review that if the schools didn't buy it and force their kids to do it like ours, no one would want this. If you're serious about actually taking a test prep online class the established reputable services cost in the same price range and include far more teaching, realistic tests as well as guided solutions with custom feedback generated based on your score especially where your mistakes are which is something you don't see at all with Sara. The other services' engines can even be programmed by the user in some cases to emphasize certain things over others once you get comfortable or have certain desires or needs. The other services' questions themselves are also better layered and the solution explanations seem to use a lot of the same words or share insights that over time build test taking skill, something that without solutions is completely absent with Sara.
We all know what these services are, Kaplan, Barron's, Princeton, Kumon, and others. My personal favorite always was and always will be Kaplan but each has their own flavor and all of them are really good, effective if the student makes the effort, more time efficient and more educational than Sara at a similar pricepoint. At parity of price unless Ray Dass greatly revamps their approach there is no contest with other options currently available on the market because they cost the same or less and are better in every way. But you don't have to be well off to prepare for these tests either because most of the $10-15 books are based on their much more expensive online classes and in a ~500 page book you get 80% of what the internet class gives at a fraction of the price so you can buy large numbers of them and do tons of questions. With so many better options I don't see much of a role for Ray Dass' Sara and would steer a potential buyer towards more efficient uses of their time and money. read more
