The SAT definitely has been dumbed down on the verbal side over the years (e.g., 1. hard vocabulary words have been eliminated, 2. analogy questions have been eliminated, 3. more context is now being given in the text of the text itself to allow the test-takers to figure out on the fly what hard or unfamiliar words mean, etc.). As a result, many students can score much higher on the verbal SAT than in years past without having worked hard over the years (or even in the months prior to the SAT test administration) to attain and maintain an excellent vocabulary. So those students with top vocabularies are finding this is not as much an advantage to them as it was for SAT test-takers two or three decades ago (i.e., less proficient students are readily getting the same or close to the same scores as they are getting). It doesn’t appear, however, that this is the case on the math SAT sections. The math SAT is still very challenging. Perhaps many of the Ridgewood High School students benefiting the most from SAT tutoring are making up for not working as hard as they should have in math from grade 6 or 7 onward, or for having had teachers or lower level classes during those grades that didn’t challenge them or that didn’t prepare them adequately to score very well on the math sections of the SAT.
