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."
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)