I have seen company descriptions in job ads that list college achievements of founders. They are invariably young Asian men. I understand that it's a cultural signifier and don't judge them. But, I also understand that I will never hear back from them because I don't share that background. So, I never apply to any job listing that references college experience of either side, other than wanting a degree in general.
As a manager, there are several qualities that I value highly in an engineer, and they all happen to begin with the letter C: Competent, Consistent, Curious, Caring, and Clear Communicators.
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.
Last month 2,400 University of California faculty asked admissions to resume using the SAT "to ensure foundational fluency." Of course many employers want to insure that too, especially when college degrees don't anymore.
The widening abilities gap followed the 2020 elimination of the SAT/ACT, a temporary measure that has now become a permanent vulnerability. This outcome was explicitly predicted by the Academic Senate’s 2020 Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF) report, which warned that removing these tests would eliminate a vital predictor of college success and obscure the impact of severe high-school grade inflation. Unfortunately, the outcomes cautioned against in that report have now materialized in the data across our campuses. All other leading STEM institutions, including the UC’s primary peers, have resumed using SAT/ACT in their admissions to ensure foundational fluency. For the University of California to remain a global leader in STEM, it is essential to restore these objective benchmarks. -- https://ucstudentsuccess.org/
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.
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.
> 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.
If they do sensitive work for the government, it'd make sense that they'd do those back-end references. Also if they are in high end finance where you want to weed out people who have demonstrated moral flexibility was well as total lack of it for certain things.
> If they do sensitive work for the government, it'd make sense that they'd do those back-end references.
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.
A lot of responses pointing out various flaws with this question, including the fact that it can be used as a proxy for ageism, the fact that the grading scale has not been consistent over time, or that most foreigners will not have gone through the US education system. However, is it really that uncommon for Americans to never have had reason to take the SAT/ACT, such as, simply not going to uni, or going straight to work after graduating high school?
You cannot use the SAT as a metric to compare different cohorts. SAT scoring has been revised many times over the years. When I took it the highest possible score was 1600. From 2004 through 2016 the highest score was 2400. Now it is back to 1600 again. Plus, both the content and the format of the exam has changed many times over the years. At times, there was no essay requirement, at times the essay was required, and at times it was optional. Hence, each year the examination produces a different distribution/histogram of scores even if you normalize the 1600 vs 2400 difference.
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.
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."
Are people who were forced to learn cursive smarter? They're just older.
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.
I learned in Brazil. Here in the California I asked my son's kindergarten teacher if she would teach cursive, and she said they don't teach calligraphy and I've never seen it described this way, but she's right.
> Take-home projects or a trial period of some kind. This makes the most intuitive sense by far: having candidates do a representative slice of the job gives you a solid idea of whether they'd be any good at it. Combining this with structured interviews was (before AI) considered a gold standard; you'd get a sense of who they are and how they work by talking, have a way to compare them pretty objectively to other candidates because of the structured and consistent nature of the interview process, and then you'd get a sense of how they apply their attributes practically to the job via the work exercise.
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.
This by default includes a whole bunch of people who didn't take any kind of standardized tests (most notably, immigrants).
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.
They are obviously using the SAT as a safer alternative to the legally dubious practice of IQ testing which can lead to running afoul of the ADA and EEOC. I'm not sure it's much safer, but I am positive it's less safe than doing timed leetcode. At least leetcode problems can be painted as relating to the job.
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.
I just applied to Epic, the EHR company from Wisconsin, and I can confirm that they also ask for SAT scores. Thankfully I have my collegeboard credentials saved
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 like it. I also like it when companies ask for 10 years of [5 year old technology] experience, or say "there's more to working here than the salary!", or other red flags that make it easy to move to the next listing.
If you think my decades old SAT score is relevant, then I know all I need to know about your company.
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.
I would never ask for them since its so cringe. But SAT scores correlate to IQ at .81, and IQ is one of the few things that strongly correlates to knowledge work performance positively. There is probably a lot of alpha from knowing candidates SAT scores. Its more useful than knowing the college they went to.
> 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?
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.
As I mentioned elsewhere on HN [0], younger generations are much more competitive now.
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.
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.
> 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.
The US education has always been competitive. In sports.
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 get them as a kid (I never took standardized tests at school). I wouldn't get 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.
I'm not opposed to the use of test scores, it's more the requirement that kids have the whole package of grades+activities+honors societies+test scores consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many. We're selecting for robots.
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.
Not really. Outliers of that sort get dealt with as an exceptional case and it works. I've seen amazingly bright batchmates get into all sorts of programs without most of the qualifications, because they were a genuine math wizard (the kind that submitted errata to a standard textbook on some weird number theory stuff at age 15), but they didn't always score the best on many exams, especially when aggregated across subjects. IIRC he's a researcher now. All trends point to him being an eccentric old hag at age 50 ;)
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.
> 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.
> [...] 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.
If you want the job, can’t you just lie? Or are SAT scores something that cannot be faked? I dunno, I also say I know Kotlin when I have more experience in Java (and honestly I couldn’t care less about specific tech stacks), or that I know about tcp/udp when all I have is read a couple of (good) books about it.
I don’t feel bad lying about some stupid requirement
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.
SAT isn't a perfect IQ test but it's not bad for a first-pass filter. Nearly all who scored 1600 will be bright and nearly all who score 800 won't be.
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.
And the meaning of the score changes over the years based on the test itself changing. Same goes for the company's GPA requirements where there have clearly been shifts across schools on the amount of grade inflation allowed or even encouraged.
As an aside, I'm not sure if I or the College Board can prove my score at this point.
Not only that, but the SAT is not an IQ test and you can definitely study for it. Students with wealthy or motivated parents can get study books or tutors which makes a huge difference in score.
The Princeton Review promises a 200 point score improvement with some of their packages. And they can fairly-reliably achieve it too.
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.
Test-taking may only roughly correlate to intelligence, and is just one dimension of a human... but they likely care less about false negatives (like you) than they do about false positives in alternative assessments.
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.
