The SAT is actually a lot easier today than it was when most of us took it.

It is an hour or more shorter in length, the long reading passages have been replaced with short paragraphs, calculators are allowed, and vocabulary has been removed.

Apologies, but which part of my comment was this a reply to?

I don't buy the notion that tests do not test relevant skills.

In my long career I've noticed a strong correlation between SAT scores and academic performance as well as job performance.

> I don't think the comparison to flight school is relevant enough in this context because it's a too different of a world to traditional academia.

My dad kept his flight school tests for flying all sorts of airplanes. They bear a lot of similarities with the SATs. There's a lot of math in there for things like fuel consumption, wind, maximum landing weight, glide distance, and so on.

For example, one day he was cruising along in his F-86 when the engine failed. he radioed the tower, and they told him to bail out. But he calculated his speed, altitude, distance, wind, sink rate, air templeratur, etc., and figured he could make the field after configuring the airplane for maximum glide. He made a perfect landing, but still got reprimanded for risking his life bringing the airplane back. But he had worked the math and disagreed that it was more risky to bring it in than bail out.

I think you’re talking out of your ass.

SAT and ACT have been shown to be useful predictors of college success, beyond what grades alone would predict.

One who cannot start the engine cannot kill me.

One who cannot calculate how much fuel he needs to cross the lake will kill me.

Remember JFKjr? He killed himself, his fiance and her friend because he did not pay attention to the instruments.

An acquaintance of mine died trying to fly through a thunderstorm. Another one didn't pay attention to the weather and nearly died from wing icing.

Flying is no joke.

The overwhelming majority of math tests involve doing math, so I'm not sure your critique is useful in this context.

Is there a reason you left out the SAT and ACT?

Because both have been shown to have predictive power for success in college.

They are never going to let you into a cockpit until you pass ground school, which involves a lot of math.

> A teacher can be brilliant in the classroom yet stumble on a standardized certification exam full of pedagogical jargon.

A teacher that cannot explain how calculus works cannot teach it to anybody.

> a coding interview that relies on whiteboarding algorithms from memory can easily fail an excellent engineer who builds great software every day but doesn't recall the optimal solution to some puzzle on the spot.

I've seen too many coders using bubble sort because they don't know enough to look for a better algorithm.

In any case, the purpose of leet coding tests is to quickly filter out the utter frauds. I have a programmer friend who wanted a job at a major software corp. He knew he'd have to pass the leetcode in an early stage of the interviewing. He figured it would take 6 weeks or so to study that material. I suggested that, since he was applying for a $250K job, that would be the most productive studying he'd ever done. He agreed, did the 6 weeks of studying, aced the leetcode test, and got the $250K.

So ya, there is a point to those tests, in filtering out the frauds and the ones who aren't willing to do what it takes to get those jobs.

I personally strongly disagree. I think it's much better to be given the opportunity to do the actual work, rather than to be required to do the pre-assessment song and dance. And if there are actual prerequisites that a person hasn't previously passed, they should be allowed to be tested on these specifically.

My wife has a civil engineering degree. There were a number of courses where partial credit was not permitted and the final exam was 2 questions. It was common for students to take those courses 3 or 4 times before passing. Giving a failing grade to only 1/3 of the class might get a professor investigated for making the class too easy.

> High graduation rates are an important metric to administrators. If a professor gave a failing grade to 1/3 of the class they would be in hot water.

I remember practically every single instructor/professor on the first day of class during my freshman year of my undergraduate study said something along the lines of "I have no curves. Your grades depend on you and nobody else. If the whole class does well, everyone can get an A. If nobody does well, everybody can fail."

So I guess this was more motivational to get us to study rather than stating facts?

Failing 1/3 of a class if that cohort is genuinely deemed not qualified enough to pass shouldn't be a problem by itself.

But then it raises questions like "are they really unqualified or is the testing methodology inadequate?" and "why was the system unable to provide the necessary growth to such a high slice of the class?". And then the easy way out is to just cherry-pick which students enter the system at all.

I remember a first lecture when I started my CS studies, where the professor said something like "look at the people to your left and to your right, it's likely that at least one of you will drop out by the end of this year; it's ok, this is not for everyone; if you truly believe this is for you, put in the effort and you'll make it"

1/3 isn't that bad in the late 80s/early 90s at the UT Austin CS department. Only ~30% graduated at the time. The orientation was literally "look to your left and looked to your right only one of you will graduate." They weren't joking!

Caltech did not grade on a curve. I recall one class were half the class failed.

That depends. Some schools actually cap the number of students permitted to continue. They fail a certain fixed number or percentage of students below a threshold, even if the raw score is good.

Disagree. Hiring and firing is better than a bad interview process. The reason we don't have that is due to regulations and litigiousness (and the laws that facilitate it).

IMO failing to get the opportunity is worse than getting the opportunity and failing at it.

Maybe Maths, but english is probably not correlated tightly with IQ as it is more affected by language background and education.

Would you include the ability to differentiate between anecdotes and peer reviewed studies in your assessment of intelligence?

The trick is to prepare specifically for SATs.

One would say the tests (and job interviews) should have been designed with the original intent of testing candidates AS IS, i.e. preparing specifically for such tests should have been considered as cheating... But at some point it turned into prep gymnastics, and measuring how desperate the candidates are.

That's not how it plays out in practice. There is overwhelming evidence that students who otherwise excel academically score fairly mediocre SAT scores on their first attempt and then jump substantially after weeks of targeted practice and/or tutoring, even though they didn't learn anything new in the classroom.

If attention in class were all it took then that improvement couldn't happen. What changed was familiarity with the test, not classroom focus.