[Hizonner]

> The point of trying to determine aptitude is exactly that it does not measure current ability to perform specific tasks or possession of specific domain knowledge, but rather general ability to learn/flexibility to be given new tasks.

Great. You can go ahead and do that then... provided that your test actually measures that and not a bunch of unrelated knowledge. Which is a lot of what an "aptitude test" designed by a clueless person will actually tend to measure. And honestly is also a lot of what the ability to get a degree tends to measure.

You might be able to fix the test, but I don't think you can fix the degree.

> IBM straight up gave me math problems (like solving systems of equations under time pressure) when applying to my first programming job in addition to some basic whiteboard coding.

... which is mostly going to measure how recently you've had to do a bunch of similar mathematical tasks, to the point where that overwhelms almost anything else. And has the bonus of not being obviously related your general ability to learn or flexibility. I suppose how you do on that might have some correlation with your ability to code under similar time pressure... which of course only happens in badly managed projects.

That's exactly the sort of selection process you get when you let clueless fools try to come up with ways to measure things like "ability to learn" or "flexibility".