[Misfire]

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Passing an actuarial exam is extremely valuable, with a present value of something on the order of $15,000 PER EXAM, and probably a few thousand takers per sitting for the early exams. There are businesses built around study aids and classes to pass them. If there were easier strategies to pass them than actually learning the material because of a problem inherent to standardized tests, there would be huge financial gain from teaching them. Same for the CPA exams and bar exams.

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LDO

There are numerous courses for beating the CPA, Bar, actuarial exams, LSAT, GMAT, GRE, DAT, MCAT, and anything else you want to toss out. Some of these tests are more legitimate than others (LSAT, for instance isn't as susceptible to work-arounds). If you'd actually read my previous posts, one of the issues I've brought up more than once is the sheer difficulty of writing an objective test to be given to such a large population as HS grads. The LSAT, Actuarial Exam, Bar, CPA, etc. exams don't come close to serving that many test takers, and would be much much much more difficult to write if they did. The GRE comes closer in student population but still pales in comparison. Administering the GRE requires writing and testing about 10,000 new questions PER MONTH. It is also one of the least objective (most beatable) tests ever created.

Your original point was that the SAT would be suitable for evaluating educational quality. This has stood up so poorly to scrutiny that you've had to switch arguments twice--first from that to it's ability to predict college success (comparable to unrelated predictors like race and diet--whoopie) and then it digressed into asserting the mere possibility that some test somewhere might possibly maybe be objective. This is pathetic.

Bottom line: If I can teach your kid to beat the SAT without learning math, then it can't be said to objectively test math. No matter what it predicts about the future, correlates with in the past, indicates with statistics, the fact remains, you don't know from a high SAT math score whether your kid learned math. It is not an objective measure of academic performance.