[michaelhoney]

Lot of people in here offering cheap opinions, while mgirdley's team has done the actual work. They're not saying that the kinda of algebra test they're proposing is foolpoof, perfect, subjectivity-free, or even the best way of testing for programming aptitude.

What they _are_ saying is that the test is an efficient, effective way to do it, with better ROI than IQ tests.

It doesn't actually matter _why_ that's the case, though Animats' suggestion seems plausible: "From the test questions, this isn't an "algebra test". It's a word problem decoding test. That's appropriate to programming, where you have to go from an informal specification of the problem to a formal one."