At Think Prep, a testing outfit near Penn Station, six students bent over desks in a windowless classroom. They’d been there for the past six weeks, Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., studying practice S.H.S.A.T. questions. (The program costs five thousand six hundred dollars.)

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The instructor, whose name was Andrew, wiped down the board. He’d attended Hunter College High School, another school with exam-based admissions, though it uses a different test. “It’s a mess,” he said, of the S.H.S.A.T. “It’s one test—one test date. You might get sick. You might get nervous. The test itself is a black box. It tests obscure concepts. They don’t release how the scores are calibrated, and there’s a weird curve.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-students-trying-to-get-ahead-in-a-one-test-system