Very often parents who put their children in private schools hire for their children private tutors to teach to the test. It is quite rampant here in California and has motivated the University of California system to eliminate (over the next 9 years) the SAT and ACT as entrance requirements. Of course they will replace them with their own institutional exam that will be "better".
Private firms that tutor
THE TEST are big business nation wide, but the SAT and ACT were already discredited long before their arrival on the scene. The fact is neither has ever been a reliable predictor of academic performance, but they were successfully marketed to overworked and too often browbeaten college admissions officers as a tool for justifying their decisions. Like
THE. TEST they were an attempt to quantity an extremely complex matter using very simplistic methodologies.
Based on years of experience as an instructor at the undergraduate and graduate university level I would put far more weight on cultural background, and immigration status, as predictors of academic performance than the ability to pass a given test. As a practical matter I too often saw students dropping out of my classes because there were "too many _______" (fill in the blank with the cultural background of your choice, there are any number of options) because "
they will set the curve too high."
