and people didn’t obsess on them like they do today.
College coaching/advising/counseling is at a whole other level. I rarely heard about any of it.
Today, with the internet, it’s on steroids.
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I refer back to the interview with the UC Irvine professor, Richard Haier in the testing thread at #1485 Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, CalTech, and UT-Austin to Require Standardized Testing for Admissions - #1530 by Canuckdad. At least he posits that the G load has been reduced in the newer tests and that studies on the older tests showed limited improvement while the newer tests showed improvement with coaching @ the 6 minute mark.
I was a Kaplan tutor during college to pick up weekend beer and pizza money. It was not easy to tutor certain parts of the SAT that required a level of intuition like the analogies and the more complicated word/math problems. It was easier for me to help my kids prepare as the questions seemed to be more straightforward with repetition and recognizing patterns being very useful.
Note that the SAT/ACT requirements are only for US applicants.
The holistic admissions game is popping up more and more in Canada too, partially due to influence from the US, but mostly as a response the high levels of high school grade inflation that’s happening here as well, especially as there is no standardized testing. Since in Canada you apply for admission either directly to a major or to some degree of broader program category (departmental or faculty), holistic admissions is predominantly reserved for some of the most highly selective/in-demand programs (e.g. Waterloo Engineering/CS, McMaster specialty programs, Western Ivey and Queen’s Smith Commerce etc). It’s become a fairly common requirement for pre-professional programs like Commerce, Engineering/CS, Nursing since they’re currently in such high demand.
UBC also practices a degree of "US"esque holistic admissions for all it’s programs but as far as I know it’s the only university that practices it on a global basis.
Having said that, “holistic admissions” as it’s practiced in Canada, doesn’t reach the level that’s required for the most selective colleges in the US.
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Analogies were easy if you knew the words, hard if you did not. Hence the best test prep for the 1980s SAT verbal was learning more of the words commonly used on the SAT.
The math section was just algebra and geometry.
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