Cookie-cutter kids

SAT Math and Verbal Scores Hit Highs
Yawn.
Considering that an entire industry has grown up around standardized testing that is focussed on one and only one thing — increasing scores — this is not even a big deal at this point.
Kids routinely get 1600 on the SAT anymore. When I was in high school that was a rarity. I’m quite happy with my 1360 (junior) and 1390 (senior) scores.
I also scored nearly 700 on the GRE in 1990. And I spent exactly zero time “preparing” for it. I just walked in, picked up a pencil, and took the test. To be entirely honest, I was just taking it to see what it was like; I planned to take it again before I applied to grad school. When I showed the scores to the graduate director, he just looked at them, looked up at me, tossed them back to me, and said, “You’re in.” (This on a day when he and his successor were looking over grad school apps and the high GRE scores on them were running in the mid-400s.)
Of course I was 30 years old at the time, which may have had something to do with it.