I just posted a comment about my step son who had stellar test scores after we spent $1200+ on a private tutor. Did he get more qualified for college than the kids who had parents who couldn’t afford private tutors?
Yes he is more ready to be a clog in the machine. He passed the first test. He studied enough leetcode and it doesn't matter how he got there. Will the tutor be there in college and will he be able to absorb all the information college gives are bigger questions.
Excellent question. I’m of two minds here. As a high school student, I too struggled to get great test scores. I took the SAT four times, which finally resulted in a score that could get me scholarships.
Did I become smarter? - I sincerely doubt it.
Did I become less likely to fail out of college? …Seems unlikely, but I don’t know.
As an admissions rep, I understood that high scores, whether SAT or GPA, are certainly both proxies for a prediction: If I admit this student, are they going to fail out?
Unknown: It actually might be the case that students who get private tutoring are less likely to fail out because their parents can financially endure them struggling to repeat failed courses. I’d be interested to see a study on that.
Did your final score more accurately reflect your abilities? Probably. Can everyone increase their score by hundreds of points by repeated testing? Probably not.
Who knows? My first score in 10th grade without any specific SAT prep made me eligible for the only well known school I applied for my senior year - Georgia Tech. By the time I was doing specific prep for the SAT in 12th grade, that was only to get the award for the highest SAT score.
By the time I started prepping , I had already accepted a scholarship for a local college with the plan on doing joint enrollment after 3 years.
I didn’t do that either. I was tired of college after three years and just graduated the next year and started working. I didn’t really care about GT.
The underlying assumption in these anecdotes is that if everyone had equal access to test prep resources they would show an equal increase in performance. But the studies[1] don't bear this out. If someone is an outlier in terms of coachability, that probably means there were gaps in knowledge that could be filled quickly to have an outsized effect on score. But this seems relevant to suitability for college admission.
The same article states that even the minor change in scores:
> That means they ought to be irrelevant to college admissions officers. Briggs found otherwise, however. Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions