Coaching and studying improves SAT scores. People learn the type of questions they do poorly on and can study to improve. The SAT is a test you can study for.
The SAT is a test of your academic preparation, not Raven's progressive matrices. That you can study for it is not inherently a bad thing. Portions that are highly susceptible to coaching are bad, and that's why there aren't analogies any more.
If students learn the vocabulary and practice the math to do better on the test, at some point it just becomes the Key and Peele Heist sketch: "That's called a job!"
Agreed. I spent a bunch of time a few years ago doing home-coaching for our two teenagers as they rolled into SAT time. The way you get better at the math section is to genuinely fix whatever gaps might exist in your knowledge of algebra and geometry. As OP says, that "is not an inherently bad thing."
There's probably another 20 points that can be picked up by learning to read the questions very carefully -- so that you don't race to show how quickly you can spin-up an off-task answer that precisely matches the wrong question. Getting that right also "is not an inherently bad thing."
The verbal section is a bit more of a swamp, and there might be a larger element of gamesmanship there. But for schools like MIT, where math aptitude is the main event, I think keeping a math-focused role for the SAT can help a lot.
It identifies not just the elite-school wizards with lots of AP and math SAT 800s -- but also the teens from humbler public schools that didn't have an AP track, but whose 790s on the (pre-calc focused) math SATs speak to their ability to play at a higher level.
Apropos of analogies, I think the test-takers got rid of those because they can be ridiculously skewed to particular (affluent) cultures. For some people, it's obvious if yacht-to-dingy is akin to symphony-to-quartet. For people who grew up with less money, it is a total WTF moment.
I remember an analogy question that required knowledge of alcoholic drink formulations. I was way under drinking age, and had no idea what went into a martini.
You might be under drinking age, but you should have years of practice making mummy and daddy martinis at the end of their work days if you want any chance of succeeding at $PRESTIGIOUS_OLD_INSTITUTION
The top link is a study that shows that the improvement is pretty marginal in practice.
It does miss something: in specific ethnic enclaves SAT coaching is much more effective, perhaps because of a culture of out-of-school schoolwork and teaching beyond SAT prep. Those enclaves aren't particularly wealthy either (if I recall correctly it was a Korean enclave). Even then we're talking 70 points -- not nothing, but also not a radical transformation.
I wouldn't be surprised if those improvements were mostly moving below-average scores toward the average, by giving deprived students basic skills that their "education" didn't.
And there are books available to help with a lot of that. (And I actually agree with the point that doing some amount of test prep/sample tests is helpful. But it doesn't need to be super-expensive/time-consuming. I do understand that the playing field has probably upleveled over the decades but it's still probably as democratized as any such thing is.
My own anecdotal experience confirms that sat and act tests are very studiable. Honestly even more than average tests just because there is so much material available to study with.
