It turns out actually learning the material on a test over the span of a few years helps you do well on the test. That used to be called getting an education.

Right! But the problem is that you don’t actually get much of an education along the way. You get a bunch of not super useful knowledge that you’ve almost surely forgotten and some test taking skills. This is the downfall of so many programs that teach to the test.

The problem with this reasoning is that the SAT isn't an arbitrary test. Presumably the course material came before the SAT was developed to test mastery of the material. Sure, the course material then changes to better capture what the SAT measures, and the SAT adjusts in kind. But this adversarial process doesn't optimize arbitrarily. Learning SAT material (rather than say learning tricks) is learning substantial math and reading skills, the kind that serves you well in college. So characterizing this as anything other than getting an education is disingenuous.

Teaching the test and getting an education are not the same.

> cramming for 4 years.

That's not called cramming. It's called "learning". It means the test is working as intended.

> since you’ve been cramming for 4 years.

You could say the same for pretty much every educated person who has done an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Seems like a lot of human progress has been made as the result of people that have been "cramming for 4 years"

Any evidence to support this?