A lot has changed since then, college acceptance rates are plummeting and competition is absolutely cutthroat. I graduated ~10 years ago in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood and basically everyone took at least one SAT class, multiple practice test and many had coaches to help them with the entire admissions process.

Caltech's freshman class size is also about 50% larger than in my day. These days I also hear that people shotgun out applications (much easier to do with a computer rather than a typewriter!) which increases the rejection rate even with the exact same number of students.

I have no idea if the relative quality of today's Caltech freshman body is better or the same as in my day.

I flipped through an SAT vocabulary builder book the other day. I knew nearly all the words in it already. Vocabulary is something that happens organically, by reading a lot and looking into complex things. I suspect that memorizing word lists builds a fake vocabulary. Some people have told me they recognize when someone sprinkles their language with the daily word they memorized. It comes off as pretension, not education.

I suspect that if SAT training involves learning fake knowledge and test taking tricks, anyone who gets into Caltech via that method is going to find they're in the wrong place. Students there like to sit in the halls and talk about ways to build a warp drive. Students who don't belong will be watching the game on TV.

One of my good friends there had an apartment off campus. He'd regularly make his special chicken wings and invite all comers (this was not to be missed). The apartment manager would come, too, and he'd just quietly sit off in a corner by himself, munching on chicken wings.

I asked him once why he was there - he didn't participate, and he was way way older. He replied, "oh, this is incredibly fun. I've never ever heard people talk like this before. I just like to listen."

I’m 18 now and took the SAT two years ago - I scored well without the need to practice too much, but official practice is available completely for free on Khan Academy. You really don’t need to pay anything to improve on the SAT these days, and anyone arguing elsewise is misguided as to how the test actually works.

And also - I agree - I never really learned “grammar rules” or the details of writing. I just learned from listening, talking, and reading many many books in elementary and middle school. To prepare for a test by memorizing vocab seems inherently the wrong approach.

Yup. I was taught to diagram sentences in school, but it seemed a useless skill, and I no longer recall any of it. I know if a sentence is grammatically correct or not just by reading it. There's no conscious thought process to it at all.

I read a great deal as a kid, too. Mostly scifi :-)

I made the mistake of attempting to learn German by memorizing. But who can remember which nouns go with der, die, or das? Not me. I bet the right way is to simply read the newspaper every day, looking up the words one doesn't know, one by one.

> You really don’t need to pay anything to improve on the SAT these days

I heard something on This American Life, I think, about a "strong student" from a bad high school doing poorly on the SAT. I got the impression she hadn't prepared at all...which seems odd for a strong student when there are free resources.

> memorizing vocab

The College Board got called out for some of this after the "regatta" incident. It turns out rich kids were much more likely to know the term for a boat race. Oops.

I'm really curious to see the outcomes of the no-SAT cohort of college students, once the 2020-2021 year is ignored, data cleaned, etc. Even if GPA was enough in 2020, it seems like it would get harder and harder to compare schools over time without a standardized test.

The only question I recall from the SAT was about analogies. It required a knowledge of the contents of various liquor drinks, like a martini.

I was just a kid. I didn't hang out in bars. I had no idea what the contents of a martini were.

I thought it was unfair, and was so annoyed I still recall it :-)

> people shotgun out applications

Isn't there a common application, now?

Acceptance rates are meaningless because the denominator means nothing.

College Board worked with Khan Academy to put a free SAT prep course (with practice questions that it uses to figure out what you need to work on) together. Even if you don’t have internet at home, you could definitely get enough prep with an hour at a library or your lunch period a day. I boosted my score 100 points and only did 15-20 hours prior.

I think 15-20 hours of prep is reasonable, especially when it can be over months. I bet it would have taken more like 200 hours for another 100 points (which I why I don't think the test is as easily gamed as test detractors say).

The typical student aspiring to get into an elite college is aiming to get over 750 in reading and math. In my year getting one question wrong on math would reduce your score to 770.

Things are a bit less competitive on the subject tests. A couple questions wrong was still sufficient to get an 800 on Math level II my year.

In my view, we would do better with our educational resources and reform efforts to completely ignore the elite colleges and let them take care of themselves. I would much rather figure out how to support and strengthen the education system from the bottom up, starting with the community colleges, trade schools, and regional public universities.

Times have changed a lot. Your advice might have applied as late as the mid 1990’s, but not much past the turn of the century.

In hindsight, boomers had a really easy time of it, even some we rightly revere for their contributions. Work hard, or be brilliant, or some combination of the two. That’s not enough today. Ken Thompson told the story somewhere of being literally chased down the east coast after graduation by Bell Labs recruiters. That would never happen now.

Even if that were true, on the other hand it's never been easier to access information for free, and it's never been easier to do a startup.