You can totally get a perfect score in the SATs and have bad spoken English. Having trouble speaking a language is only loosely correlated to being able to understand written language, especially when it’s language of tests. People who have gone through learning a second language seriously get this.

The SATs are also stupidly easy compared to entrance exams in any other place on the planet. If you are gifted and study seriously for a week you can get yourself a very good score no problem

I’m sure that there are cheaters, but if your reference is “bad spoken English” that’s not at all conclusive

I know you are referring to Chinese students. But the reality is that SAT and GRE are stupidly easy, especially math. Almost every Chinese student I know achieved full score in GRE math, and yes, more than half of them spoke broken English.

I'm in no way implying my anecdata is conclusive, but I'm mainly suspicious of the verbal scores. And, if the verbal section of the SAT is stupidly easy, I guess I'm stupid, shucks :(.

It doesn't have to be bribing others to take the exam for you. I heard that they write down the questions they got asked during the Verbal part of the exam and collect them so other students can memorize them and get good scores. It's been happening for quite a long time actually, a professor of mine told me the same when he went to school in the 80s or so.

On a side note, the notion that a private company conducts all these tests for profit in order for students to get admission into schools quite bizarre and laughable to say the least.

Counter anecdote: college roommate who grew up the bulk of his life in mainland China had major problems with spoken English but his written English was fantastic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯