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Comment by an_opabinia | Hacker News Reader

The exam is totally coachable, you just have to do cram school. Those studies look at private tutoring which spends possibly 1/20th of the time kids spend in cram school. Cram school is often conflated with private tutoring but they are completely different things.

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Sure but the amount of time you have to spend on cram school starts to make it not worth the points gain. The top schools all reject a bunch of 1600 scorers every year. If all you have going for you are good grades + good SAT you probably aren't going to get into an elite place. Sure it'll help you get into a tier 2 school, but at that point you're usually better off with a public option.

That’s the point of the entire argument. Elite schools don’t go by scores and grades alone.

Parents who sent their kids to cram school, or tutoring or whatever, and kids with perfect scores are mad that schools aren’t basing admissions solely on scores and grades.

What it boils down to is that Asian American kids are outperforming most other groups on the SAT for whatever reason. Elite colleges don’t want student bodies that are 70% Asian American.

Elite colleges also don't want the type of people that will spend 4 hours a day cramming for an uninteresting test.

Yes, but elite public high schools do. Which feed the elite colleges.

Also, middle schoolers don’t really have a choice in the matter. If it were up to them, they’d play Roblox and watch TikToks all day.

No they probably don’t. That’s one side of the argument.

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