How many of those kids are being shunted into something like Duke's TIPS program in 7th grade to then face a full-on SAT? That happened to me and once I saw the math involved, I just closed the booklet and put my head down. That told me pretty early on that math was not my thing.
Oh man, 7th grade was the year that math finally became fun to me. Up until that point, math had always been my least favorite subject, because it was all plain arithmetic. Then 7th grade we hit pre-algebra and suddenly math was fun. I wound up doing mathlete-type competitions, and I actually did pretty well in the Duke TIPS SAT. I remember there being a lot of stuff in the math section that I'd never seen before, but I knew it was supposed to be for high schoolers and didn't expect myself to recognize it, and it was multiple choice so I just tried to figure everything out the best I could. I forget what my verbal/math breakdown was but my total was a 1370 (back when the SAT was out of 1600).
History became my least favorite subject after that, because suddenly math was about solving problems, not being a human calculator, and history was still just memorizing names and dates and facts and regurgitating them back out on demand, which I am terrible at.
