The simulation of light scattering by heterogeneous dielectric objects that are large compared to the wavelength is the bottleneck of many quantitative imaging techniques. The rigorous Maxwell equation solvers are slow and have high memory requirements; several approximate models have been developed to address this issue. Most of these models have proved effective in simulating the forward scattered field. In this work, we focus on the multilayer Born (MLB) approximation that has been introduced recently to simulate the backward scattered field. We compare its results to those of a rigorous Maxwell solver. We define a domain of object size and permittivity contrast for which MLB can be used with good accuracy. We point out the superiority of MLB compared to most approximate methods for calculating the backward scattered field.