The UC faculty opposed the SAT requirement being discarded in the first place. They were overruled by the UC Regents, and that may happen again. And even if the SAT is brought back, I'm sure it will be given much less weight and subjected to the "in a local context" process in the name of equity.

I always enjoy the advocates who claim that students have mastered their subjects, but "don't test well".

Would you want a pilot on your flight who flunked flying school exams, but somehow "really knew how to fly!"?

It’s frustrating when easily predicted outcomes are ignored for the sake of feel good policy.

Why is a lossy testing filter better than just failing out those who can't make it? Maybe allow for larger freshmen classes and smaller latter classes or adopt community colleges and have all students start there and advance into the UC system sophomore year on. Instead they bring back what is basically an IQ test for admission.

Griggs v. Duke, 401 U.S. 424 (1971).

SAT score is known to be predictive of college grades. Is it also predictive for whether a mid-to-late career candidate will pass a phone screen? It is used for early career candidate filtering in finance, but I have not heard of anybody caring beyond that because of the availability of signal on the actual tasks they will be performing.

how many elected leaders are in STEM? would high SAT scores and grades exclude many US presidents and congressmen? (yes) winning elections seems kind of important to me. so if you were just like, selecting for leadership - and many of our leaders are brilliant people, just not in the sense of being good at taking tests - would that be good or bad? or... what is your real opinion? what are you actually mad about?

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.

Someone once told me that American work culture used to be based more on intern-ship / apprentice type hiring but now obsess with formal degrees. I wonder how much of this shift in culture is influenced by the Korean, Chinese and Indian immigrants, as a formal education is a prerequisite to compete in these countries' job market? For example, it is quite common in India for employers to ask for our 10th and 12th standard marks / grade (because these are national exams) along with college grades - to apparently gauge "Consistency". Fluctuating performance, a break or dropout years all negatively impact you and can be nerve wracking for many freshers, until they manage to get some work experience. It is somewhat disappointing to see this culture permeate to America too, even though I feel quite conflicted about it - after all, everyone does want to hire the best / most competent / reliable candidate; but the other approach - a vocational kind of training - also has its merits and seems to have served American companies well too. (Zoho in India is experimenting with this kind of hiring in India where they are hiring high-school students, mainly from rural areas, and offering them a work cum study program. They don't get any formal diploma or degree though - https://www.zohoschools.com/ ).

I think it is a positive for an employer to ask for an SAT because it tells me right away I don't want to work for them. Once (a long time ago) I tried to upload my resume to apply for a job. The web page started asking me very basic questions, like a basic aptitude test. I was out. Tell me you do not know how to find and evaluate talent!

You forgot that the SAT requirement is not exclusive but an additional data point. While I agree that it could narrow the path for truly good employees, I’d argue that an additional data point like SAT (+ GPA) could tell the employer a lot about consistency of the applicants. Or at least an interesting talking point (“I see you got a very high SAT score but your GPA was lower, what happened?”), if they care.

I think it could serve the purposes of hiring fresh/young graduates. However, it’s still weird if they requested it for people already 5-10 years or more in the industry.

I've seen what happens in engineering with those with low SAT math scores. They need others to do the math for them, or they just wing it.

I remember one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic amplifier. He spent days trying random things. Another engineer asked what he was doing, did a quick calculation, and put in an RC circuit that solved the problem.

C = Competitiveness.

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.

The scores have changed, but ideally they are asking for the percentiles. Those are scaled to the current year.

Yeah they’re much easier now.

You can look at historical percentile by year and score though.

The job description touts investment from some members of the "PayPal Mafia." For some odd reason that fact that and the SAT requirement combine to make this whole thing feel kind of normal.

> Low ego: There can be significant economic upside to this role as things progress, but the nature of this role day-to-day may involve things that can be less exciting / more mundane (it's a job, after all!)

What does this mean?

> Please note that we will also rely significantly on both solicited references (where you introduce us) as well as unsolicited or "back-end" references (where we do our own). For the latter, please rest assured that we will never contact a current employer without first getting your permission.

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.

airbnb asked me why i didnt go iit in india and interviever soured after that. it was a chinese guy.

That does seem wild. Out of curiosity, did he also have to submit GRE scores, which would be closer in time and more representative of his current knowledge/skills?

That's r = 0.81 right? so R2 would then be ~.66. Meaning that 66% of the variation in IQ scores can be statistically explained by variation in SAT scores.

It's really high for psych stuff. If you even get r=0.5, you've got a great result there.

But it is important to note, I feel, that SAT maps to only about 2/3 parts of the IQ score, and IQ score is also a quite fuzzy measure here for things like knowledge work job performance.

I do agree though, you get quite a bang for your buck just reporting these numbers.

But, if you explicitly tie money and compensation to the SAT score, man, that is setting up some very perverse incentives around it. If it adopts widely to do so, then you're gonna get some really strange interaction effects there.

>I would never ask for them since its so cringe. But SAT scores correlate to IQ at .81

The combination of these two phrases is the equivalent to "I hate Trump, but ..." in another context.

> and IQ is one of the few things that strongly correlates to knowledge work performance positively

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?

IQ testing isn't legally dubious. The idea that it is is an Internet myth. There are a couple household-name corporations that administer general cognitive tests for candidates for some roles.

More companies don't do it because it doesn't work well.

> Higher scores mean better students, more funds, higher home prices, bonuses, and a litany of secondary effects.

Sounds like an IQ test

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but every job interview is a derivative IQ test. That includes leetcode.

The SAT doesn’t test course material. It is literally just applying middle school math and English proficiency.

Sneaky immigration filter? Most wont have an SAT score at all

Between 2005 and 2015 the maximum score was 2400 instead of 1600. Assuming anyone who got <1600 during that period wouldn't admit it, you now have three well defined buckets.

But of course this is a lot of unnecessary steps compared to the usual method: length of work and education history +18 years.

I remember mine (both from when I was 12 and when I was 17) close to 30 years later.

Sneaky age filter? You must be young enough to remember your SAT scores.

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."

It’s an approximation for an IQ test

I only had one company (D. E. Shaw & Co.) ask for my SAT scores. I was late-20s and had to have the recruiter repeat herself two more times before I understood what she was asking.

It was also the single highest density of talent I’ve ever worked, by a long shot. Crazy talented coworkers.

They made me do an online, timed IQ test, stressing that I should take it in my native language to not waste precious seconds understanding it in english.

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.

wild to call out a random org like that…

You only need to SAT/ACT for going to get into an university. And these days it seems to matter less. I looked it up and less than 50% of high school students take the SAT/ACT. Personally I never had any employer ask for my SAT/ACT scores since the 90s.

Best middle ground I ever had was an interview where they impose a strict 1 hour (maybe it was 90 minutes, idk) time limit between when I got the prompt and when I emailed them back. Then they spent some time looking over it, then I had an interview with an engineer who had read my code and we chatted about it. Why I had made certain decisions, what corners were cut because of the time limit, etc.

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.

Out of curiosity, did they require SATs, or just ask? And how many years out of HS are you? Seems like it would be crazy to ask for them once someone has finished college and has a UGPA to report.

Their pre-screen test was awful. Brain teasers, including some infamous ones like “if you have two coins that make 15 cents and one is not a nickel, how is this possible,” and moderately involved programming questions like “parse phone numbers from a file and record those with any of these area codes OR every other digit is a 2 OR they have multiple pairs of consecutive digits” and you’re given a blank text box with no formatting, IDE, or even non-word processing style indentation help.

I see we (as a society) are now full Primeagen: "Epic as in health records, not Epic as in Fortnite."

I took both (since I could just use whichever I scored better on for applications), and the ACT is a much less miserable format. The test is broken up into much larger time chunks, meaning I could take a more useful nap after finishing a 50 minute section in 20 minutes than I could finishing a 20 minute section in 8.

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.

In Virginia, I had never heard of the ACT until I got to college

4.0, what no APs? Insta-rejected. /s

My problem is it's self reported, so it ends up being a "are they smart or did they lie?" game. You can't easily verify it for anybody over 23 or so.

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.

> > Why would you ask for a self-reported, unverifiable test score that could be decades old at this point?

> 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 disagree with the increase in competitiveness being a good thing. Excessive filtering at all levels has meant that eccentrics or absent minded professor types are not making it into research roles, and creatives or mad geniuses are filtered out before they have the chance to make an impact. 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.

The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity.

> [...] you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution

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.

> 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

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.

“ getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT” Typo? 2100/2400 << 1500/1600 in terms of rarity.

Extreme competition isn't good. It will just lead to race to bottom.

Whatchoo talkin about, Willis? I've had to supply references for every job I've had.

Somehow it seems every other hackernews was living in a much better timeline, job-wise, than I during the ZIRP era.

> If you want the job, can’t you just lie? Or are SAT scores something that cannot be faked?

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 remember the Cisco (!!) table was the most popular table at the campus job fair, and they turned away anyone without a 3.8+ GPA. I had a 2.42 (2.40 was minimum degree requirement).

Dodged a bullet there. I've worked happily at a FAANG for many years now and somehow I've avoided living in a cardboard box by a dumpster.

Many years ago I was walking around a college job fair when a recruiter was yelling at a college student. His crime: "wasting everybody's time" by presenting a Resume with a 3.4 GPA when the company clearly listed a 3.5 GPA as the minimum they would accept.

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.

I've been talking to a few companies lately, and one just keeps stringing it along, having me talk to manager after manager. It's been 6 weeks, and still no end in sight

That cost-benefit analysis makes no sense if you had a pretty good scores. What's the point in fudging a few extra points if it means that diligence reveals you to be a liar?

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.

SAT isn’t an IQ test, and probably all sorts of people took it before they had cultural awareness or a diagnosis that would have lead to different testing conditions had it been taken after diagnosis, let alone the fact that test scores are not comparable.

GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.

Can you say the same for SAT tests, where the score is best of N and N is however many the person can afford and varies between candidates?

I never done an iq test, but just curious, can’t one simply “rehearse/study” for such tests? I dunno, let’s say you do a few past IQ tests (with answers available), I guess one could get a higher score just by doing that

I dislike this argument. I think in some dimensions these types of tests can work, but I’ve never been the type of person who’s been able to score well, and I don’t test particularly well in general, yet I did my PhD work at <IVY LEAGUE> and have had a great career despite this. I think that testing is good for people who can be adequately evaluated, but for people like me it just leads to a lifetime of feeling like something’s wrong with you.

I can't speak for others here and we don't have SATs in this country, but these things can be very unfair. When I was seventeen, I had a lot of things to deal with which were not of my own making, such as caring for a terminally ill relative and wondering if I would even have a roof over my head a few months down the line. That kind of thing tends to take your mind off school work. Several years later and I was in a much better place.

I think it's fair enough to say teenagers in general have more instability in their life even without this.