[zdw]

Similarly, on the SAT I took a prep course where I enjoyed and did all the math work, kind of slacked off on the reading, and on the official test got a 800 math, 680 reading score. I finished the math before the allotted time, by a few minutes.

I don't think this has anything about being smarter - it's all about knowing the kinds of questions and their format, which is the key benefit of the prep work - you'd get to skip the time-consuming step of trying to understand the question format (analogies, really?) and just get down to solving it, giving you more time.