The old joke with the SATs was that you got 200 points just for putting your name on the cover page.
I’ve always been a decent taker of standardized tests, but I know people who are astronomically more intelligent than me who scored abysmally on the SATs. Intelligence is not an objective measure despite what they want people to believe.
It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: as soon as you observe someone/something, you change it. By testing people, you are putting them under pressure and changing the way they think. Making a test timed put even more pressure on the tester.
I didn’t even take the SAT, I did take the ACT. I did fairly well on the that.
The SAT is not an intelligence test; rather the test results statistically correlate with the ability to succeed in college based upon the academic standards of the particular institution. The SAT is a predictor of success, not a measure of intelligence.
There is something, however, to being smart under pressure, and a deadline.
Being smart, and a buck, doesn’t buy you coffee in very many places anymore.
There aren’t standardized tests for character, or persistence, and those are both, to me, as highly prized as smarts.