[JamesBarney]

The question is not "Does being rich help you with the SAT?" The question is "Does being rich help you more on the SATs the other possible criteria?" Because being rich and having resources helps with everything.

And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.

[slt2021]

SAT prep being affordable only for rich is such a silly meme.

SAT prep materials are FREE at your local library (or high school library), anyone who is smart and has willingness to study - can study and nail this exam.

and SAT is very very easy exam nowadays, nothing compared to Indian/Chinese/Singapore exams

[aprentic]

This was actually the very first statistics project I ever did. We had the basic high school level "Probability and Statistics class". We learned some simple combinatorics, some formulas for the normal distribution and the basics of hypothesis testing. The we were told to do some project (it was junior or senior year so they gave use fairly wide latitude).

I wrote up a survey of people and distributed to classmates who had either taken the SAT more than once or had taken the PSAT and then the SAT. I asked them if they took a prep class and what kind.

The results strongly supported the meme.

There was a big gap between people who did and did not take prep classes. There was a small but statistically significant difference between the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan (I don't remember which one won) and there was a large gap between people who took group classes and those who had private tutors.

I didn't collect any demographic information but it was at a fairly expensive private school in Manhattan. Mostly white kids. The minority kids were mostly from prep-for-prep.