The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.
For this to be a real test, you'll need parents of twins willing to send only one kid to test prep..and not send the other one..you know..for science. Doubt there is a parent who would do that.
What's the issue with testing someone without prep, then giving them a week to study up, and then testing them again? People take SAT multiple times, you know, and it is a brand new set of questions every time.
I did that myself (took it 3 times total), and I can say this: taking it without prep and then taking it later with just a week of studying on my own for about an hour per day made a massive difference. Even before I got my results back on the second try, I already felt i did much better, as I was second guessing much less and felt more confident about my answers. And the final scores reflected that really well.
However, studying beyond that (which I did for my third attempt, months later) didn't help much and just marginally changed my scores by +-20 in different categories (out of 700 total max in each of the three categories, which is how it was scored at the time). I didnt feel any more prepared either. Judging by my acquaintances, it was a similar pattern. Massive boost in scores on the second try, marginal or non-existent in scores on attempts beyond the 2nd.
https://archive.org/details/ScholasticAssessmentOrG/page/n1/...
It’s like being shocked that resting heart rate and VO2 Max happen to correlate quite well relative to other health indicators. Yes they are testing different things, but not that different.
In that case I weep for the future, because I’ve met plenty of dumbass people who managed to get a high enough SAT score to get in school.
(I'm not talking about you).
I feel this must at least be a factor.
People do see over 100 point increase ~20 hours of prep, and extensive as in 3+months can push that to 200 though with diminishing returns at the top of the curve. Which shouldn’t be surprising as increasing speed, even just from not needing to read instruction, provides an advantage for most people.
Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.
I've lived in multiple countries. In the non-US ones, people don't brag about being bad at math (even when they are bad at it). As an adult, if you couldn't add/subtract/multiply two large numbers on paper without a calculator, that would not reflect well on you.
Yes, my memory of high school is that everyone including the adults celebrated sports, and hardly anyone gave a crap about the high academic achievers, who were often social outcasts.
I spent a lot of my childhood trying (though largely failing) to pretend that I was not so smart. I can't speak for other countries, but anti-intellectualism is widespread in the US.
For a couple decades a majority of people in the US had effectively gotten coupons for half-off everything they desired.
It wasn't normal, but it made those generations in the US so mentally lazy that it effectively poisoned huge swaths of the following generations, fooling them into thinking it was always going to be that easy. So now we're trying to sort out exactly why those born and raised in the US are doing so poorly now.
Anyone who wanted a job got a good paying job. It was possible in those days for the average American to support a household as the sole breadwinner. What is happening now is that those halcyon days are over. Things are more competitive. We have not approached the cut throat levels as they have in South Korea. American jobs today pay less and have less benefits than in the 1950s. We are headed towards a two tier economy. Full time employees with benefits. Gig workers who wander from job to job with no benefits.
Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?