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.
This is so foreign to me. I am older to have such young kids so I took a test in 3rd grade that got me into the gifted program, then took the PSAT (to practice for the SAT) and the SAT to get into college. No annual testing, no steady stream of evaluations. Things are out of control! Nobody prepped me (unless you consider being a latchkey kid watching Popeye cartoons and listening to the Beatles Greatest hits "prepping").
But, is there really evidence that prepping kids is truly causing disorder? Are there vast numbers of prepped kids in programs that are too difficult for them because they kind of "cheated" the system to get in. Does this really happen?
