>> I don't really have evidence for this, but it's always felt like SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes" that cost you score.
As i learned in college, the real "coaching" was rich parents getting rich kids more time on the SAT by getting psychiatric diagnostic classifications that give you more time.
Time has been the real challenge on SATs for most people beyond a certain score threshold, and money can buy time.
I finished the SAT early, and used the extra time to go back to the beginning and verify each answer. More time wouldn't have done much. If you can answer the questions, there's enough time to complete the test.
I understand your perspective-- my test memories were all breezing through tests with copious extra time... But as an educator I've noticed that there is a wide variation in the amount of time needed for a test between students. For some tasks it is nearly an order of magnitude.
The students who are quick and on the competitive math team finish something in 6-7 minutes and some other students are doing correct work but not quite done in 45 minutes. More practice doesn't seem to make them much quicker, either.
And this is in students without a formal diagnosis that allows them to spend extra time.
[There was one time I crashed and burned on a test and ran out of time... where I didn't memorize enough of a big table of identities for a trig test and ended up having to derive everything from scratch]
I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.
A typical exam at Caltech would be 4 problems and 2 hours.
I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them from using them a lot. And having worked enough algebra/trig problems, you can just see the answer in your head as you read the problem. (This turns out to be a big timesaver at Caltech, where every course was a math course. When you're dealing with calculus, you really need to have moved past struggling with trig.)
At some point in the last 40 years, however, they've slipped my mind.
> I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.
Sure. But the grandparent's point was: if you're the student taking 3x longer, your parents can buy you a disability diagnosis that gets you extra time.
> I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them from using them a lot.
Yah, a reasonable course would make this possible. My analytical trig class was pretty heavy on obscure identities, and the first exams I was like-- no big deal, I know how these are derived, I can figure these out as I need them... For the purpose of that class, nope.
Are you suggesting that wealthy people can bribe the profs to bestow better grades on their students?
Or the grad students who do the test grading?
BTW, Caltech's testing was done on the honor system. That meant no proctoring, and it was entirely up to the student to adhere to the time limits, and any other instructions on the test.
You didn't need wealth to cheat. Any student could, and with half a brain not get caught.
I recall one physics midterm which 2/3 of the sophomore class failed, including me. I suppose that precludes there being large scale cheating going on.
>> Are you suggesting that wealthy people can bribe the profs to bestow better grades on their students?
>> Or the grad students who do the test grading?
Not bribe. Hire as tutors with $. This happened pretty regularly at my college (Cornell) where ex-grad TAs were hired as tutors. You could focus on just what you needed to study if you could afford to hire them.
Here in the US we just went thru four years with President Trump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump) who could not even communicate with clarity and rattled barely coherent ideas. He graduated from Wharton, the most prestigious finance program in the US. He is just one case I thought of. Does everyone really think he was the most qualified candidate to be in the very small inbound class at Wharton? Does everyone thing he was actually qualified to graduate based on merit?
For students in the category of "exam easy. finished the exam w/o any time issues", the whole sub-thread is irrelevant. You're going to ace the exam rich, or poor.
The sub-thread and discussion is about wealth bias for exam scores.
As i learned in college, the real "coaching" was rich parents getting rich kids more time on the SAT by getting psychiatric diagnostic classifications that give you more time.
Time has been the real challenge on SATs for most people beyond a certain score threshold, and money can buy time.