Originally Posted by Val
Originally Posted by Bostonian
If we have reached the tipping point where most talent search participants are preparing, it is the students who not prepare who are getting the most biased results (in their case, downwards). Another argument for preparation is that there are Tiger children of Tiger parents who are motivated to study (vocabulary, for example) by the prospect of taking the SAT again.

Yeah, but the problem with hyper-prepping is that you miss out on the real talent. This problem starts to show up when the prepped ones enter their chosen fields and don't produce the results their CVs implied. High scores on standardized tests do not equal talent. They equal high scores on standardized tests.
I am not too worried about this. Maybe Tiger parenting can raise my eldest son's chance of getting into Harvard from 5% to 10%. But if he does get in, he will have to handle difficult courses like Math 55 on his own, and he should be able to assess his own ability relative to that of his classmates.