The system has been broken for a long while. A couple of years ago before I came to US as an undergrad, there were these test prep schools (e.g.New Oriental Ed

The system has been broken for a long while. A couple of years ago before I came to US as an undergrad, there were these test prep schools (e.g.New Oriental Education) in China that specialize in teaching students tricks about taking SAT test without actually studying the subject/course materials. Given that CollegeBoard has been doing poor job keeping the question bank updated, the prep schools would hire people to take the SAT exams in Hong Kong or other Asian countries and memorize the questions, in order to observe patterns and collect questions from the Collegeboard question bank. I spent a summer at New Oriental prep school in Beijing and learned absolutely nothing in terms of actual subject materials, but all these tricks about how to "guess" answers without understanding the questions/statements for the reading section, which is the weakest point for a lot of Chinese students. For writing, we were taught to memorize famous people's life stories such as Jack Welch, Bill Gates, the founders of Starbucks, etc, to fill up bulk of our essays (wouldn't the graders grow suspicious if a lot of people are citing Jack Welch's life story in their essays??). Math is whatever. Most high schoolers in China wouldn't have much problem with SAT math. I quit the prep school half way and did self-learning instead, and I am glad I did that. My score wasn't fantastic, 2040 compared to all the 2300s and 2400s out of that prep school, but not until I came to college did I find people with perfect SAT scores but could barely communicate with people in English, read, not to mention understanding lectures, etc.