Mock exams are one of the best ways to prep. My kid improved her PSAT 10 scores by 100 points from sophomore fall to sophomore spring, without prep and without learning much more. It was just having taken the test and being familiar with the format.
Still not a meritocracy, because that assumes that all students have the same conditions to study, to take the test, and have the same level of accommodations for testing and learning disabilities.
Also, the point of Harvard, or of any of the other similar colleges, is not for it to look like Stuyvesant. They want to look like what they are now - the place where the wealthy, famous, and powerful studied and/or sent their kids. All other kids are there because there is a good chance that these kids will end up wealthy, famous, and/or powerful. There are also the kids who are there to keep the illusion that all Harvard students are super-smart and talented.
On the other hand, Caltech looks like Stuyvesant without requiring a national standardized test.
Of course, we cannot call China a “meritocracy”, and India is very definitely not a meritocracy, while the UK managed to maintain a society with generational stratification by class and income, not to mention race, despite all of these having nationalized exams.
I do agree, though, that a nationalized exam will be a great tool.
Still, such a thing would not be some sort of a panacea for inequity, especially in a society in which inequity is embedded into our entire financial system. So long as K-12 students can only get the level of education that their parents can afford, despite having a “public” education system, we will not get even close to having an equitable K-12 education.
This is really a lot of what is being lost in the discussion about the SATs.
While I do think that the SATs are problematic, it is because I believe that they are flawed, nit because the idea is bad.
However, on its own, even the best designed test will not ensure that the higher education system is equitable. It will just make sure that wealthy students will not have additional advantages in testing, compared to poorer students with the same academic abilities. The kids of the wealthiest Americans get the highest SAT scores, but are not getting any of the top academic awards like USAMO.
However, the biggest issue is, like others have mentioned, the huge amount of inequity in the K-12 system.
Even if we are able to create a test which measures the academic abilities of high school student sin a 100% equitable manner, kids who attended underfunded high schools will score much lower than kids with the same innate academic talents from better supported high schools.
That is without mentioning issues like food and shelter security, spaces to study, time to do homework, help from parents, healthcare, etc.
Unfortunately, it seems to be that the lines are drawn between two pretty simplistic views. The first is that SATs, as they are, are a perfect measure of a students academic abilities (inherent or acquired), are entirely fair and unbiased, and they should be required, or even be the main factor in determining admissions to college.
On the opposite end, you have people who believe that poor students who have been failed by the K-12 system are still able to succeed in a high intensity college system, despite not being taught the basics, nor having learned the required skills of homework, readings, etc. They ignore the basic fact that being failed by the K-12 system generally means that the student has not acquired the required skills to succeed in college.
Both are flip sides of the same coin, since both believe that SAT tests are supposed to be measuring something innate. The first group claims that they are measuring inherent, inborn academic talent, while the second believe that they are only measuring wealth and privilege.
Both sides are ignoring the fact that even well designed tests measure the skills acquired in school, and that wealth and privilege do indeed help a student acquire the skills that they need for success in college.
The first side claims that the skills are the result of some sort of inherent superiority and that wealth and privilege have nothing to do with their skills. The second group focuses on the wealth and privilege and ignores the fact that these skills are very real and needed for college success.
It all comes back to the inequity in K-12 education. The first group claims that there is no inequity - that every student in the USA is getting the K-12 education that is commensurate with their abilities, while the second group is denying that the huge inequity has little effect on the critical skills that students are suppose to acquire in high school.
[aside]
I think that the benefits of wealth on SAT scores go far beyond the advantages that wealth has in acquiring the skills that the test is supposed to measure. The fact that the kids of the top 0.1% get better SAT scores than the kids of the other top 1%, despite these kids not demonstrating any other amazing academic or intellectual talents is a pretty good indication of that. But that is about the SAT as it is, not about testing.
[/aside]
when I’m drafting