You're correct.

Not really. I think of the SAT as a great equalizer since a brilliant kid in rural Nebraska will do well and be able to go to an elite college, while a silver spoon heir will spend thousands and maybe improve their score but certainly not max it out.

Not to toot my own horn but I got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT with little prep, and I've tutored others on the same and only managed to eke out a little improvement. (In contrast, I've tutored math course work and had more success there.)

The math isn't very advanced, it's just a matter of doing it quickly and accurately.

I did very well on both tests in high school without much cramming (I skimmed one study book from the library), and scored something like 90th percentile when I took the ACT in middle school.

Whether this is correlated to anything important in real life is an entirely separate question.

Maybe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

From a psychometric perspective, they are IQ tests, in that they show the same correlation with IQ tests that IQ tests show with each other.

From a research-into-today's-hot-button-issues perspective, they are routinely slammed for being about cramming, but the effect of test preparation on test scores tends to be very close to zero when you look into it.