When I left my private elementary school in the south and my mom who was teacher didn’t want me to go to the public middle school we were zoned to, she applied for me to go to the one local magnet school. She was told through official channels that there was a waiting list. She called up the admissions officer - she had tutored their son - and miraculously there was a place for me.
Did I get more “intelligent” after the phone call?
However, I have no reason to believe one of those two factors is at place when looking at the top ten students of a given school. With cheating you don't aim for the top, to make it easier for your cheating to remain undiscovered and there's no point to invest lots of resources into a student that isn't failing, since there's nothing to gain, at least from my perspective. Or is there a cash price tied be being in the top ten?
Edit: got carried away, this want a discussion about universities and not thus really applicable. Still interested though.
I can give you another example from my own life. Like I said previously, I graduated from a low rated public school on the small town south. I had the highest SAT score in the school and the second highest in the county (around 1000 graduating seniors). Not bragging, it was far from a perfect score. How much of that do you think is due to my natural brilliance and how much do you think it was due to my mom not only being a Math teacher who was teaching me high school math in middle school, but her also doing SAT tutorials in middle school and sitting down with me at night to help me solve SAT practice problems in high school?
I’m sure that my learning Latin in the magnet middle school that she called in a favor to get me into didn’t hurt me doing well on the English portion.
Besides, there was a recent well reported scandal about how rich people were able to game the system and bribe people to get their kids in school. Their punishment was a slap on the risk while a homeless poor Black lady is spending years in jail for enrolling her children in a school that was out of her district.
