"Standardized test" is pretty vague. I remember reading about drops in IQ scores which are on a scale centered around 100 where anything outside 50-150 is really exceptional (many tests don't go higher than that), whereas the SAT runs from 400-1600 which is a swing about 10x higher, so maybe 6 pts on the SAT is like 0.6 on IQ.

The difference between the airfield and the racetrack is that the race car could be switched to some other high octane gas or you could race some other kind of car whereas for general aviation you really don't want an engine to fail when you're in the air and the industry is both essential and moribund at the same time so you it's hard to ask people to get new planes or new engines.