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#sat#scores#job#test#score#more#college#don#tests#school
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Discussion (135 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The answer is probably no. I got many friend they got good marks in SAT, but they were average.
obviously the UC system should give spots to the kids who will use those spots the best. but it is very hard to define what "using spots the best" means.
I think there’s an influence, but it’s amplifying a pre-existing trend. Bureaucratic societies favor formal credentials. The U.S. has become much more bureaucratic since the mid-20th century, and credentialism has grown. Reliance on degrees and other formal credentials also enables the universities to achieve political goals through admissions and grading policies. Asian immigrants in the U.S. have readily adapted to that system.
In fairness, part of job performance was passing the actuarial exams, the first two of which were calculus and statistics. I imagine testing well on the SATs for a math or EE degree (what they hired) was a good indicator of passing tests.
But if I were < 5 years out of college, and especially if I had gone to school during COVID times (when SATs were not required by many colleges), I would completely understand why an employer might ask.
Basically, colleges used to act as a filter for SAT and other attributes. During the 2020-2025 period, they admitted students under fairly different standards, due in part to testing challenges and social movements.
It makes sense for an employer to want to do a little more diligence to ensure that students who were admitted during this period are similar to students admitted during the prior several decades.
While SAT scores might act as a proxy for competency and possibly curiosity, they're not going to tell you much about whether the person is consistently reliable, whether they care about others and cooperate well, or whether their vocabulary or literary analysis skills have any correlation with their ability to read the room and tailor their communication to their audience.
If I were giving these job posters the benefit of the doubt, I would guess they're including this requirement for the same reason that musicians request particular colors of M&Ms in their riders. They want to weed out people (or bots) who aren't paying attention. Nevertheless, there are better ways to do that than demanding (and presumably filtering by) teenage performance metrics.
I met an HR manager who had worked for a local but well known company with a reputation for caring about things like GPA and SAT scores. She told me that remembering your SAT scores after college was a sign of a competitive attitude.
https://beaverhand.com/apply/alpha-vantage-gtm-team-various-...
References already give me goosebumps. Having them reach out to people who haven't given you permission to be a reference sounds like a recipe for disaster.
If they do government work that requires clearances, the clearance process already covers this sort of investigation on its own.
In any case, they are free to do whatever background checks they want within legal limits, but I'd never apply to a company with such ridiculous hiring processes.
AI changes the underlying job you're testing for. So, obviously, the tests you might have been using pre-AI won't work anymore; they're testing something that isn't really the job anymore. Update your tests so they're about the real work again, that's all. For coding, that probably means assuming (or requiring) candidates use AI to do your assessment.
What AI really does mess with is conversational/interactive interviewing. We do all our interactive scripted interview on Slack, but I can imagine us having to end that practice and return to face-to-face.
i think you mean that it correlates to pay. nobody knows what you mean by "knowledge work performance." reviews of your peers also correlated with pay. often it is not the smartest person who is the most popular. so... do you see how you said something kind of meaningless?
I actually was pretty easily able to deduce what they meant by "knowledge work performance".
It's understandable to be frustrated by not knowing something, but to claim "I don't understand that and therefore no one does and you're being nonsensical" is a bad look.
Consider responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
A very good metastudy is "The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology" (by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter). It summarizes 100 years of research on predicting job and training performance. It makes a very strong case that General Mental Ability (GMA, their word for IQ) is the single most valid predictor of employee success on the job, not just income.
After all, it would be illegal to make a hiring decision based on the race you specify you are when you apply. But SAT scores...
But of course this is a lot of unnecessary steps compared to the usual method: length of work and education history +18 years.
I can remember mine just fine.
If you're really looking for smart people, use "Answer this word problem in two or more paragraphs. Write your answer on the sheet of paper provided. In cursive."
Doing this may well expose you to age discrimination lawsuits, since it's just sneaky indirect age filtering.
Another example would be if you required a minimum SAT score of 1601. Sure, someone could have gone off and taken the SAT as an adult or a young child but in reality it is mainly an age filter.
My kids are learning cursive in elementary school right now, FWIW.
Additionally, the SAT is a shitty IQ test that is constantly crammed for and cheated on. I remember my SAT test. I was the only person in the room not openly cheating. The teacher proctor didn't care. Higher scores mean better students, more funds, higher home prices, bonuses, and a litany of secondary effects. That's not even including people that pay professional test-takers to do it for them.
The software industry needs to let go of their obsession with finding 10X ROCKSTAR L33T programmers. They never will though. It has gotten worse every few years for decades, and the problems are almost entirely managerial.
More companies don't do it because it doesn't work well.
Sounds like an IQ test
The (albeit small) country I'm from doesn't do any. Reasoning was that standardized tests create an environment where teaching is merely done to create good test scores, not to actually teach.
Heard nothing but bad things about their hiring process.
It was horribly translated, every sentence was written like something this: "A and B are two broters/sisters. A gives B 3 apples and he/she/them eats one and returns one to he/she/them…" at some point one section had the instructions wrong so I did all the questions wrong. There was no way to change the language or re-read the instructions to try to understand what the original text might have actually been.
That's when I closed the tab.
I'm a Debian Developer.
https://canonical.com/careers/3752633/application
If you think my decades old SAT score is relevant, then I know all I need to know about your company.
It was also the single highest density of talent I’ve ever worked, by a long shot. Crazy talented coworkers.
Unfortunately a lot of companies have over the last several years been using this to get candidates to do a project for free for them. If it's going to take more than a few hours of my time, I don't take project style interviews seriously unless compensation is added (which some companies do offer and is a big green flag).
Definitely been tricked into working for free a time or two.
Felt very fair. Not enough time to assign a valuable task, enough time and privacy that I wasn't under the gun like you are in a whiteboard interview, and it was pretty applicable to what I would be doing at the company. Solid interview. Didn't get the job, but respected the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAT-ACT-Preference-Map.sv...
Difficulty wise, the ACT was easier, but not by a lot. They seemed to have pretty similar predictive strengths, based on percentiles of people I knew lining up between the two, but obviously the ACT loses precision because of how coarsely it's scored.
Ignorance is always a possibility here, as it might be their first time hiring.
Because many colleges that used to reliably filter for them no longer do (or didn't during a several-year period).
It's true that self-reported scores are not the most accurate, but if I were applying for a job I would report honestly, on the assumption that they could easily request for the scores to be sent by the College Board. The risk/reward of lying does not make sense, at least in my case.
> It's true that self-reported scores are not the most accurate, but if I were applying for a job I would report honestly, on the assumption that they could easily request for the scores to be sent by the College Board.
No, they couldn't, except by going through you (the College Board doesn't take third-party score requests.) You might be able to request that if they are recent enough, but not if they are literally decades old (well, not if they are ~21 years old or older.)
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/scores/sending-sat-scores/...
I'm also aware that the College Board doesn't hang onto scores forever. I doubt there are any employers who require SAT scores for applicants who took it prior to 200% (the cutoff indicated in your linked article).
Canonical has a job application where you are supposed to rank yourself on a percentile (up to like 1 in 10,000) on how good you were at math in high school. It's a very easy way to incentivize lying, and also to hire people with an excessively high appraisal of themselves. There are a lot of people who are reasonably good at math, and have avoided humbling environments like the Putnam, and have convinced themselves they are God's gift to math, when in reality they were just the brightest kid in a class of 100 high school students.
Somehow it seems every other hackernews was living in a much better timeline, job-wise, than I during the ZIRP era.
I don’t feel bad lying about some stupid requirement
I would assume that if you progress to the point of an offer, they would ask you to have the official scores sent by the College Board. Apparently they hang onto scores back to 2005 and can send them for a fee.
I was denied a role with a major engineering firm based on my 3.something GPA!
They needed a 3.4 or 3.5.
If this is how they treat people that don't yet work for them, it doesn't bode well for how they will treat people that work for them.
Visit and talk with undergrads at a top CS program like Stanford, Cal, UIUC, MIT, etc. The culture is different because this is a much more competitive generation. When the acceptance rate into a top CS program is in the 1-5% range and laurels like being a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity sports team member in HS, getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT, and taking 6-7 APs are now table stakes, you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.
This mindset is the norm across Asia though - from the Gaokao to the JEE to SKY-or-bust. Honestly, I'm glad that younger generations are much more competitive now - pressure makes diamonds.
And honestly, the top 40-50 STEM programs nationally graduate around 30-40k new grads a year. Add to that respected regional programs and Veteran-to-Employment pipelines and you have a self-sustaining talent pipeline.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506001
The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity.
This assumes that you can get to the top via rote skills alone. Rote learning only gets you so far and most of those kinds flame out.
It's hard to describe, but once you meet actually talented people what you end up seeing is that they're just extremely diligent and deeply passionate about a topic and will continuously execute.
For example, when I was in HS I wrestled. Yes there were physical differences that could impact a sparring round, but technique and preparation was almost always able to outcompete base innate talent. Later, I ended up learning ballet the Russian style and it was the same - the truly creative types who were at Vaganova or Paris had already built strong fundamental and technical skills which allowed them to mix and match and create.
You cannot be creative without also being diligent and understanding fundamentals.
The "eccentrics" and "mad geniuses" are few and far between, and to find people with talent, you do need to use exclusionary tactics like scores and interview performance.
Its school system has always been a state-sponsored daycare.
SAT/ACT tests reflect this. I can get a perfect score in SAT math easily. And I likely could do that as a kid (I never took standardized tests at school). I wouldn't have been able to get the perfect scores in the Chinese gaokao or Korean/Japanese tests.
> There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions.
This is just nonsense. Are you saying that we should kick out smart kids with high test scores to let in absent-minded students who care about only getting drunk so that they _might_ become great researchers in their 30-s?
To the topic at hand: it's way too easy to fluff your resume with nonsense like "Coordinated a responsible team for an implementation of cross-cutting concerns improving customer retention change by 12.23% across the organization". Test scores provide at least some objective measurement.
There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century, and it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way.
The filtering system is meant for the majority case and there it works. The outliers get dealt with as outliers, which also works. In this case, he later asked the author of that textbook who he emailed with the errata, to connect him with the group he wanted to work in. Needless to say it was a very strong referral.
This is very true in my experience, except I subbed out Valedictorian with multiple varsity sports/student government and the SAT with ACT and I didn’t even get waitlisted at top schools.
I think there's a lot of truth to that. (Aside: Many manage without the viciousness part. It's not their fault their parents lined them up with an internship and a research paper co-author in high school, and they're not jerks about it.)
Though the current generation of students didn't invent hyper-competitive. Before software engineering jobs (and startups) were high-income and high-status, you'd see that mentality among many people on track for Wall Street, for example.
Another example: Before CS was a go-to for the hyper-competitive, a mentor of mine actually switched from pre-med to CS, at an Ivy, because a percentage of pre-med students were outright sabotaging other students, and it turned him off of the field.
> that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.
Though, there have been -- and hopefully will remain to be -- people doing it for the love of the field, who are not impressed.
Other than the genuine people being crowded out of admissions slots and fratbro interviews by Wall Street types...
If a Palo Alto helicopter-parented overachiever McDojo black belt tries to pick a fight... with a humble rope-belted person in Asia, who's studied martial arts for the love of it... the latter will chuckle good-naturedly, and help the Californian up off the ground.
Yeah those are the worst, one time I had an “interview” with a company that I really liked, the founder is also an awesome guy and we chatted few times and all is well. Then I got invited to their facility, great place and team, some of them were structured on how they evaluate, but most of them were an absolute mess, and some of them were hostile as if I would get hired it will get them fired the day after (the passive aggressive of trying to belittle your projects or work and not trying to understand your approach it but to attack it instead) and when I would ask them in a good faith about something they did, you would get a fake halo effect with “oh I can’t tell it’s secret! NDA bla bla” as if they did a patented work.. it was horrible method to hire people despite the great founder I knew.
In my opinion, the best way is what I usually do, after initial screening, I give them an assignment that they can do in few days and then return the work, the quality of the output will determine that, and it’s exactly how you will do in real work anyway, and you get to measure their critical thinking and problem solving rather than how would they sell or articulate something on the spot (maybe they are overwhelmed and their head went blank), as I am looking for an engineer not a sales dude, and they would tale some time to build and solve it.
(Save the "but that's fraud!" replies. It's not material to the job, so it isn't).
It would also be somewhat suspicious if you went to a so-so college but allegedly had a perfect SAT. It would only make sense to lie if your score was well under 1600, you went to a college that makes sense for someone with a perfect SAT, and you didn't think it was likely they would follow up with a request for the official score report.
Sure, but IQ tests show a high degree of stability over a person's life. It's not unreasonable to be interested in it for sorting.
GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.
It's a bit like BMI. Yes, if you're Peter Dinklage or Arnold Schwarzenegger it will be pretty meaningless. But most people aren't and BMI works pretty well for them.
As an aside, I'm not sure if I or the College Board can prove my score at this point.
The Princeton Review promises a 200 point score improvement with some of their packages. And they can fairly-reliably achieve it too.
I think it's fair enough to say teenagers in general have more instability in their life even without this.