<p>It’s a hypothesis, potentially testable by CB, though not by me. </p>
<p>But I’d surmise that the people writing test-prep questions for the prep companies have gained some familiarity with actual SAT questions by taking the test multiple times. Simply quoting the questions would be a copyright violation (I believe); but setting up questions that are similar in feel, or that have similar tricky elements is presumably permissible. For example, I think that in certain specific contexts, test-takers often overlook the possibility that a variable, x, might be negative; so the prep companies alert their students to that via their practice questions. Then their students would have probably have better-than-typical odds on related questions, on the real SAT. Also, I’m continuing to advance the hypothesis that the advantage winds up being slightly greater on the equating section than on the test as a whole. (For example, I’m not sure that Algebra II is featured in the equating section yet.) </p>
<p>Also, there have been reports on this forum of tests being repeated from a Sunday test date to a later Saturday test date. This suggests to me that the CB’s stock of questions is not so huge. Similarly, posts in this forum have reported rumors of overseas students being “assigned” to memorize a small number of specific questions on the exams.</p>
<p>Wild hunch–we know that CB dropped the analogies and the quantitative comparison questions. Is it possible that there were not enough of them to ensure the integrity of the tests–because it became possible for people with good prep to anticipate some of them? </p>
<p>I took the SAT 38 years ago, but I can still recall a few of the questions. Also, I believe that some of the questions on a third-grade standardized achievement test my daughter took (quite a few years ago now) were substantively identical to the questions on a third-grade achievement test I took, many, many years ago. I would not have guessed this in advance!</p>