[manfredo]

There's a difference between cheating and preparation. Taking an SAT study course is cheating in college admissions as much as hiring a personal trainer is cheating in sports or shooting hoops with your friends constitutes cheating in basketball. At a fundamental level, cheating means breaking the rules of the activity to gain an advantage. Preparation means taking steps outside of the activity to improve one's ability to perform well in the activity.

In my opinion (granted, I took the SAT for college admissions about 8 years ago), the test taking strategy is taught by the course isn't very useful - the real value just lies in taking practice exam after practice exam. If there was a just a repository of sample SAT tests that people could print out, I think 80% of the value of an SAT prep course could be achieved by just replicating the exam once a month for all of Junior year of high school. Do this enough and taking the SAT becomes second nature. This can be done effectively nearly for free - just the cost to print a few dozen sheets of paper - at your local library.