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/
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.
OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.
> vocabulary has been removed.
I flipped through a book that coached on SAT vocabulary. I knew all the words. Oh well. I never learned vocabulary as an explicit task. I simply read a lot.
I remember one question on the SAT verbal because it irked me. It asked an analogy question which required knowledge of mixed alcoholic drinks. Since I was far from drinking age, I had no idea.
No, they removed all the non-calculator “thinking” and “logic” math questions. It’s calculator stuff now.
They really nerfed the crap out of the SAT. It’s so soft
Ya, I quickly noticed that, and so didn't at all take for granted that a matching result was correct.
Graphing calculators can be used to quickly solve certain problems, like simultaneous equations or quadratics. They can also be used to plug in multiple-choice answers to see which one is correct, without knowing how to solve a problem the normal way (or not taking the time to, at any rate).
The new adaptive digital SAT complicates things a bit, in that some questions are not multiple choice.
Would you want a pilot on your flight who flunked flying school exams, but somehow "really knew how to fly!"?
The reality is sometimes tests in academia are just not very well made and don't really test what they are supposed to be testing, and that's usually due to multiple reasons like misaligned incentives, staffing shortages and maybe lack of resources / funding.
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.
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.
SAT tests intelligence (aptitude), not skills. Which is why it correlates with job performance, where intelligence can (over some time) matter as much or more than a starting point of relevant skills.
Look at this list:
Quadratic equations and functions (vertex form, roots, discriminant)
Polynomial operations and factoring
Exponential functions and growth/decay
Radical and rational expressions
Function notation, composite and inverse functions
Nonlinear graphs and their transformations
Standardized tests can be a great resource for assessing students, but they're not just testing for intelligence. Test-prep courses average increasing SAT scores by about 200 points. That's not because they're increasing the intelligence of the people taking them.
In that same way, any test, including the SAT and GRE have flaws. They can be gamed in ways similar to LLM leadeboards: test prep makes you better at them. That's one of the main reasons universities moved away from SAT; they were afraid that it disenfranchised lower socioeconomic status students (and it does to some degree). The issue is that the test is positively correlated with success in an undergraduate program, so they threw out the baby with the bathwster. The real issue is that the SAT is not able to distinguish the capabilities among students to the degree it purports to.
And if you want an anecdote to match all yours, the first time I took a GRE practice test, I got a 3 on the writing. Not because I'm poor at writing, but because I didn't really know what they were looking for. After reading a test prep book, I got a 4.5 on my next practice test and a 5 on my final practice test. When I finally took the actual GRE, I got 6 on the analytical writing. Trust me, nothing changed in my writing ability over that time. In fact, I didn't even practice the skill except through those three practice tests. Clearly the test was not capable of determining my real ability to make an argument; it merely tested my ability to adapt my writing to what was supposedly being tested.
Interestingly, the vast majority of universities that got rid of the GRE requirements for PhD programs are not going back on that. Turns out that the students with the highest GRE scores are the ones most likely to drop out of their STEM PhD. [1]
[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Anyhow, the questions were all about freshman engineering knowledge.
Responding off the cuff without any reflection on the comment you're responding to doesn't move the conversation forward in any meaningful way. It just comes across as disrespectful.
SAT and ACT have been shown to be useful predictors of college success, beyond what grades alone would predict.
Sure, just not in the cockpit
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 same can't be said for many other tests. If the test involves the practical application of the very skill being tested, then that test has direct relevance to he competency of said skill.
But many other tests are not like that. A teacher can be brilliant in the classroom yet stumble on a standardized certification exam full of pedagogical jargon. A chef can cook a variety of excellent dishes but fail a written culinary theory exam testing the French names of techniques they perform by instinct. And perhaps more relevant to this audience, 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.
> 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.
Ground school most certainly does not involve a lot of math, it's not like there's any calculus or algebra involved... it's basic arithmetic. Furthermore it's categorically false that you need to pass ground school before you're allowed to fly.
Are you just making things up?
>A teacher that cannot explain how calculus works cannot teach it to anybody.
This is a strawman argument, I never made anything that could even remotely be interpreted as this.
>I've seen too many coders using bubble sort because they don't know enough to look for a better algorithm.
This is committing a very basic logical fallacy. The fact that someone who is incompetent likely can't pass a test is not the same claim as someone who can't pass a test is likely incompetent.
Hopefully you are able to identify this logical mistake that you're committing and revise your position accordingly.
Google sez: "The U.S. Air Force strictly requires you to complete and pass formal academic ground training before you ever touch the controls of an aircraft"
They're not going to risk an aircraft on an incompetent student.
> A teacher can be brilliant in the classroom yet stumble on a standardized certification exam full of pedagogical jargon
I stand by my statement.
> logical fallacy
A implies B meaning B implies A is indeed a logical fallacy. But that does not rule out B implies A. A and B can be strongly related to each other.
Furthermore, even if the Air Force did not require IFT before UPT (the Air Force's own training program), you've completely changed the nature of your argument. I have no dispute about whether the Air Force may or may not have stricter requirements for their pilots, but that wasn't your argument.
>I stand by my statement.
You've proudly planted your flag on a point nobody was contesting, which is a strange hill to celebrate on but you do you.
>But that does not rule out B implies A. A and B can be strongly related to each other.
Discussing a topic with someone who not only uses logically fallacies as justification for their argument but brazenly doubles down on said fallacy is a good sign that this is probably not a good discussion to continue spending time on. Like am I supposed to simply accept your logical fallacy and take on the burden of disproving every claim you can dream up simply because you've asserted it isn't logically impossible? The person making the claim carries the burden of supporting it, and "they're strongly related" is something you have to actually show, not something I'm obligated to refute on your behalf.
Note that a tree implies it is made of wood. If you find a stick of wood, odds are it came from a tree.
There is no singular "IFT"... you happened to find one IFT among hundreds across the U.S. that has such a syllabus, great... but it does not come first as requirement mandated either by law/regulation or convention. Here is the syllabus for a different FAA Part 61 and 141 approved flight school that uses an integrated approach with the following quote:
"Each Module contains both a flight and ground lesson. This presents an integrated flight training process and will promote easier learning and a more efficient flight training program"
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ad1e29b372b96bedc6b1...
>Note that a tree implies it is made of wood. If you find a stick of wood, odds are it came from a tree.
This is false, not all trees are made of wood (palm trees) and there are natural sources of wood that don't come from trees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_plant
But of course... instead of just admitting you were wrong to make that logical fallacy... free to continue doubling down and making things up.
Here's something to consider: just because someone is good at writing compilers or designing a language, that doesn't entail anything about the quality of their arguments.
There certainly is when you're navigating.
Some of the more advanced math is boiled down to specialized slide rules, though these days they'd use a computers.
For example, the fuel consumption rate vs range is not a linear relationship, because burning fuel lightens the airplane and so it can go faster/further.
There are downsides if you end up a small fish in a big pond.
Longer answer - in the other reply to your doubtfulness.
This is true across the entire US system, some state flagship universities curricula are so deficient that graduate level at better schools wont even consider the bachelor level diplomas from those schools as eligible unless the applicant is top n% of the graduating class, where n is a low single digit.
The admissions committee may never publish or say it directly, but for MANY state flagship universities the B.S. level maths and science courses are simply insufficient fo higher level studies at leading schools.
Thus, companies with hiring and leadership that is aware of these conditions will also simply pass over applicants with degrees from flagship state universities, much the same as they do with online diploma mill "Graduates."
My take on this situation is that as primary education outcomes worsened in the US, state universities modulated the coursework to match the readiness of incoming students in order to keep enrollment 'available' to everyone and extract revenue from the student loans system.
The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.
It truly is a sad "state" of affairs.
The SAT is a very imperfect measure but it turns out a lot of the others are even worse.
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?
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.
This has enormous costs to the institution, the teachers/mentors, and of course to the person failing out.
And that's not even factoring in the social and psychological costs.
IMO failing to get the opportunity is worse than getting the opportunity and failing at it.
No, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) English and math has a 0.64 correlation.
The answer is probably no. I got many friend they got good marks in SAT, but they were average.
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 trick to doing well on the SATs is to pay attention in class.
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.
If attention in class were all it took then that improvement couldn't happen. What changed was familiarity with the test, not classroom focus.
Paul Graham recently posted SAT advice along the form of "when you finish the test and have more time, go back over the test and check for mistakes."
I was kinda astonished at this advice, isn't it obvious? A strategy I also employed was to do the easy problems first, so I don't miss a question that would have been easy. Apparently this has to be explained to people?
I suppose prep work would be fine for the students who didn't pay attention in class.
That's not really the case anymore. Top tier students nowadays prepare for the SAT, they don't go into it blind and haven't done so for the better part of 20 years.
https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/osp-technical-re...
That report also references another study showing that each hour of tutoring was associated with an increase of 2.34 points on the SAT score which unfortunately is behind a paywall:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282492223_Preparing...
The thing about it is I view it similarly to how in the past "well-roundedness" and "leadership" was part of hiring and admissions. We laugh at that now but my understanding is the SAT score can be improved with long term studying. So intensive SAT studying seems like a new thing that isn't evenly practiced among people in the US. So at worst SAT score usage seems like a way for an elite group to preserve and replicate itself. I have no SAT score so I feel somewhat outside of this debate and have no experience with it.
I think there’s an influence, but it’s amplifying a pre-existing trend. Bureaucratic societies favor formal credentials. The U.S. has become much more bureaucratic since the mid-20th century, and credentialism has grown. Reliance on degrees and other formal credentials also enables the universities to achieve political goals through admissions and grading policies. Asian immigrants in the U.S. have readily adapted to that system.
it's one thing to hire some people for some roles with this sort of, diamond in the rough mentality. obviously that can be a good idea. but in my experience, if you try to take leadership in that way, you are spending most of your time persuading other people that it's a good idea, which they will reject, and consequently, it's of little influence.
then you look at people who become bosses who lack credentials (or whatever), and you find out it's only because they drop out of their competitive colleges to be fabulously successful. the true weirdos out there - whatever held them back from "credentials" doesn't stop them from becoming fabulously wealthy, but rarely do they go and hire anyone else. like they do not create enterprises, teams or even families. do you get it?
The problem with credentialism is that the credential becomes the end, not a means to an end. There is a huge problem in India that there are far more people with credentials (often of dubious worth) than jobs for those people. The culture is very focused on “the track,” where you get the credential then go to the job unlocked by the credential. But the problem is that there’s very few people actually starting the businesses and creating jobs that would hire degree holders.
Between increased regulation and greater competition for jobs, the degree requirements keep going up in a lot of/most industries. I also think there is a tendency for those that have reached a level of educational attainment to push back on others without equal numbers of checkmarks. Once a role is populated by MBA, PhD, MS or even BS, individuals don't like to see others doing the same work with less credentials. Maybe it's a 'I had to do this, so you do too' mentality or a sense that it devalues their own credentials.
But if I were < 5 years out of college, and especially if I had gone to school during COVID times (when SATs were not required by many colleges), I would completely understand why an employer might ask.
Basically, colleges used to act as a filter for SAT and other attributes. During the 2020-2025 period, they admitted students under fairly different standards, due in part to testing challenges and social movements.
It makes sense for an employer to want to do a little more diligence to ensure that students who were admitted during this period are similar to students admitted during the prior several decades.
In fairness, part of job performance was passing the actuarial exams, the first two of which were calculus and statistics. I imagine testing well on the SATs for a math or EE degree (what they hired) was a good indicator of passing tests.
Not even kidding. I’ve been in a staff level+ role at 3 of the 5 faang. Applied to canonical because their products are interesting. I’m ~30 years past high school and i get hit with ‘what are your high school maths scores’. I answered the online form honestly and got a rejection email immediately on send. Phew!
Not at all kidding on that and there’s screenshots of the literally insane questions they ask online.
My first boss in the 90s eventually told me why he hired me.
"I assume that everybody at their first job with a CS degree have more or less the same level of technical competence [which is not much IMHO] so I ask which are the last books they have read. You told me a few, I usually get none, so I hired you because I hoped that talking with you would be interesting."
At least a similar-to-me bias builds a pleasing work environment because of homogeneity.
Although that probably also outs your company at risk for age discrimination.
Also, they could just ask for your SAT score and any relevant info (if you took it during COVID from your car, etc.) and then you could disclose whatever context you wanted.
People are biased 25 vs. 55 not 33 vs. 34.
The entire point of the exam was to test whether you can read a math question, input it into the calculator and select the option that matches the result within 60 seconds. If you get a couple questions wrong, you drop hundreds of points. I don’t think it was a valuable test whatsoever (and of course, it biases to students who can afford time/money for thousands of practice questions to improve this “skill” through repetition)
The English reading/writing section was much more interesting, but again, the time limitations make it a skimming test more than anything else.
Many universities allow you to ‘superscore’ multiple attempts, to combine a math and RW score from different SATs. So again, scores bias towards students who can afford to take one test dedicated to math, and another dedicated to English.
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.
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 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.
I don't know how to do that either, but "winging it" is not something that would occur to me. First I'd Google it and try to figure it out. If it turns out to be nontrivial, I would just ask for help.
And I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. After all, those same highly educated folks need my help with e.g. git a lot more often than most software needs serious math :)
Would you rather pay an engineer days to fail to solve a basic problem, or pay a real engineer 15 minutes to solve it?
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.
https://beaverhand.com/apply/alpha-vantage-gtm-team-various-...
What does this mean?
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 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.
all a good reference means to a potential employer is "you are on good terms with somebody from a previous job".
and as a job seeker, it's awkward reaching out to people you may not have talked to in a couple years to announce that you're job hunting.
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.
The combination of these two phrases is the equivalent to "I hate Trump, but ..." in another context.
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?
I actually was pretty easily able to deduce what they meant by "knowledge work performance".
It's understandable to be frustrated by not knowing something, but to claim "I don't understand that and therefore no one does and you're being nonsensical" is a bad look.
Consider responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
A very good metastudy is "The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology" (by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter). It summarizes 100 years of research on predicting job and training performance. It makes a very strong case that General Mental Ability (GMA, their word for IQ) is the single most valid predictor of employee success on the job, not just income.
If you exclude work sample testing from your analysis, all this paper is really saying is that active examination of candidates beats subjective interviews and resume scans. Well, obviously.
AI changes the underlying job you're testing for. So, obviously, the tests you might have been using pre-AI won't work anymore; they're testing something that isn't really the job anymore. Update your tests so they're about the real work again, that's all. For coding, that probably means assuming (or requiring) candidates use AI to do your assessment.
What AI really does mess with is conversational/interactive interviewing. We do all our interactive scripted interview on Slack, but I can imagine us having to end that practice and return to face-to-face.
By all measures, the way you describe any hiring processes you've designed and had input on designing the metric and the work sample, probably is both high in signal, and not very arbitrary in scoring. They sound genuinely and refreshingly good. Maybe one day I'll interact with one :)
But man, that is very much not how work sample tests work in _a lot_ of places out there.
Places with actual, formalized rubrics for what constitutes a "pass" or a "good" score are very rare, it's almost always just based on vibes of whatever person is reading your code. If there _are_ formalized rubrics, then they have "suggested allowed time" that is incongruous with what the requirements for a "pass" actually are.
All of that is downstream, fundamentally, from the design of the tests not being taken very seriously by the people doing that. And because they're not actually thinking about it very deeply (or they're not allowed to because of time constraints or whatever); "sit down and redesign this task from first principles thinking about what AI enables now" is just not something that happens, and you just get people increasing the scopes of the project blindly.
One (me) might argue that now, more then ever, reading matters. The age of AI, only increases the value of critical thinking and reading comprehension skills. Combine that with a (notable) 5-10% change in SAT scores, and it would appear that this practice is unlikely to unearth what factor is being filtered for.
Mind you, no one has ever not accused our industry of tunnel vision, and confirmation bias.
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.
More companies don't do it because it doesn't work well.
Sounds like an IQ test
But of course this is a lot of unnecessary steps compared to the usual method: length of work and education history +18 years.
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."
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.
My kids are learning cursive in elementary school right now, FWIW.
By definition, people who know more things are smarter than people who know fewer things. That's just how it works.
For centuries, people have striven to improve themselves through the acquisition of knowledge and skills. It is a quirk of recent generations that so many members take pride in their lack of knowledge.
I'm repeatedly bewildered by my Millennial colleagues who proudly say "I don't know what that means," or boast "I don't know what that is" with no sense of shame.
Imagine, you have two people. Person A knows cursive, person B does not. Person B knows the ins and outs of Newtonian physics, person A does not.
Which person is smarter? Which person would the cursive test say is smarter?
What you seem to have mistook for people not knowing things without shame, is people valuing knowledge not by the preponderance of its quantity but by its total when multiplied by its utility.
Otherwise I do not envy the shame you must feel at lacking the knowledge of which plants are edible, how to.clean a carcass, how to fashion a needle from bone and an axe from stone, the mixture of clays to use to make your bricks, and all manner of other once-necessary tidbits whose usefulness has lapsed for the general population.
One could learn this skill in their 20s or beyond, but there's an opportunity cost – why not something else that would actually improve work performance, or that you enjoy doing?
I still wish I'd been taught in elementary school, though, because it would've been really useful as a student. Some of our teachers discreetly handed out practice booklets to students who'd "expressed interest" (their parents taught them the basics and teacher noticed); most of us were not so lucky.
Not wanting to learn cursive is like not wanting to know lower case just because caps lock exists.
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.
Heard nothing but bad things about their hiring process.
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.
If you think my decades old SAT score is relevant, then I know all I need to know about your company.
It was also the single highest density of talent I’ve ever worked, by a long shot. Crazy talented coworkers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAT-ACT-Preference-Map.sv...
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.
Those requirements were never real, anyway. I don't have any degree. The last time I was seriously questioned about it during an interview was 2004.
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.
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.
I really don’t want to eat soup in front of someone I’m interviewing with.
Ignorance is always a possibility here, as it might be their first time hiring.
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.
Because many colleges that used to reliably filter for them no longer do (or didn't during a several-year period).
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. The risk/reward of lying does not make sense, at least in my case.
> 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'm also aware that the College Board doesn't hang onto scores forever. I doubt there are any employers who require SAT scores for applicants who took it prior to 200% (the cutoff indicated in your linked article).
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.
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.
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 do that as a kid (I never took standardized tests at school). I wouldn't have been able to get the 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.
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.
This is _also_ a very US thing. Without true competition, students have to fluff their "resumes" with nonsense to get admitted into good colleges.
Other countries have tougher tests that can provide a better signal.
> We're selecting for robots.
I disagree. We're selecting for people who can set a goal and follow it.
Apply the same arguments to sports. Should we not stop all the competitions until the age of 25?
Ideally we'd follow a more exam focused system more like the UK, though I wouldn't want to require all students to only study 3-4 subjects towards the end of high school. But something in the european model of IB/Abitur/A Levels, where there are serious exams in various subjects at the end of high school for all uni bound students, plus some special higher level exams for the most elite unis (in the vein of Cambridge's Sixth Term Examination Paper). We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels, and possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission.
Edit: this doesn't let me reply again, I think the chain got too deep. But the point is that we're not just using AP exams and USAMO scores, we're also using a pile of other metrics around extracurriculars, GPA, and honors societies, and the end result is stressed out children and not actually having better outcomes than we did two decades ago. Declining admissions rates at elite colleges do not reflect smarter and more productive incoming students.
There are many ways to make a more competitive and objective system. I honestly don't have a lot of professional experience with any particular one, so I don't have strong opinions on a particular form it should take. A European model is good, some kind of mix of Chinese+European would also be great. And ultimately, these systems would be more fair for applicants.
And the current topic just highlights the ridiculousness of the status quo. For most people in the US, SAT is the _only_ objective test score that they have.
They are already being used like that in college admissions today.
> possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission
Already in use explicitly at most of the top CS programs today
> I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 20 years ago, but rather they are much more cutthroat about many things that are orthogonal to being successful adults
The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation.
Also, even at solid middle tier universities like UC Riverside, the calibre of student has increased dramatically over the past decade [0]
And to add to this, learning itself is a _skill_. Working on a complex problem, looking at it from different angles, spending time memorizing facts, working on learning to paint fine lines - these are all skills that you need to master.
By not motivating children to do that during their formative years, you set them up for failure later in life.
Yes, there will always be exceptions, humans are extremely variable. But for the general case just letting children float along without any goals or competition is not a great general strategy.
> 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.
Instead, a large portion were immigrants or the children of immigrants who arrived in the US as part of trans-national brain drain from countries with strict education systems (eg. Hungarian Jewish Americans in WW2, Eastern Europeans in the 1980s to present, Asian Americans today).
There's a reason Asian Americans, Eastern European Americans, and immigrant African Americans are overrepresented in leadership and white collar industries despite the very real handicap of having extended periods time without US citizenship or a greencard.
Instead of optimizing for feel-happy edge cases, we should be optimizing for building the best talent where possible, and that requires being competitive.
> We're selecting for robots.
Frankly, this is insulting as well. Yes there are some late bloomers, but they are outliers. If they can truly succeed they would stil find a non-beaten path to succeed in a competitive ecosystem.
> consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many
Only to y'all "heritage" Americans. For those of us who are kids of immigrants, we learnt that life is a race, either you compete or you fall to the wayside.
Except that there aren't that many management positions. And once _everyone_ is doing complex financial stuff, you end up losing competitive edge against other countries.
Not really, and I say this as someone who works in VC with peers in PE, Growth Equity, and other segments of high finance.
If you have the resume to get hired as an IB Analyst you will also get hired as a new grad SWE or APM at OpenAI, Google, or Roblox where they would earn the same or more than as an IB analyst with chiller work hours.
People overestimate finance salaries - it's the same as big tech with worse hours.
> And if the Yanks...
I don't think you live here in the States or Canada and as such haven't experienced our job market.
Please butt out of the convo.
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Edit: can't reply
> Have you experienced the US job market outside of the Valley and NYC
Yes.
Before I switched to VC, I've managed teams and hiring for teams or product lines that reported to me in North Carolina, Georgia, Virgina, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, and Colorado, and helped open my previous employer's Prague and Warsaw offices.
I also started my career outside of Bay Area or NYC tech before my stint as a staffer.
Additionally, the majority of tech hiring in the US remains consolidated in a handful of geographical locales [0].
And FWIW, I've worked all over N America.
What the hell does that even mean?!?
I started my career working on on low latency computing at a networking company and was paid roughly the same I would have earned as an IB Analyst at JPMC. If I kept climbing the tech ladder I actually would have ended up earning more than I do today.
> I preferred the hacking...
Vast swathes of the tech industry are working on actually innovative stuff AND being paid top dollar, such as my stuff in HPC being dual use.
> And tech != STEM, as biotech/pharma is rather different than selling ads and harvesting information
I know. Not all "Big Tech" is AdTech. And salaries for scientists in the biopharma industry are comparable to big tech salaries as well (not for the SWEs in that industry though - they're cost centers not generating IP that matters).
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.
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.
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.
Somehow it seems every other hackernews was living in a much better timeline, job-wise, than I during the ZIRP era.
I don’t feel bad lying about some stupid requirement
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 was denied a role with a major engineering firm based on my 3.something GPA!
They needed a 3.4 or 3.5.
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.
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.
Yeah those are the worst, one time I had an “interview” with a company that I really liked, the founder is also an awesome guy and we chatted few times and all is well. Then I got invited to their facility, great place and team, some of them were structured on how they evaluate, but most of them were an absolute mess, and some of them were hostile as if I would get hired it will get them fired the day after (the passive aggressive of trying to belittle your projects or work and not trying to understand your approach it but to attack it instead) and when I would ask them in a good faith about something they did, you would get a fake halo effect with “oh I can’t tell it’s secret! NDA bla bla” as if they did a patented work.. it was horrible method to hire people despite the great founder I knew.
In my opinion, the best way is what I usually do, after initial screening, I give them an assignment that they can do in few days and then return the work, the quality of the output will determine that, and it’s exactly how you will do in real work anyway, and you get to measure their critical thinking and problem solving rather than how would they sell or articulate something on the spot (maybe they are overwhelmed and their head went blank), as I am looking for an engineer not a sales dude, and they would tale some time to build and solve it.
(Save the "but that's fraud!" replies. It's not material to the job, so it isn't).
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.
Sure, but IQ tests show a high degree of stability over a person's life. It's not unreasonable to be interested in it for sorting.
GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.
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.
As an aside, I'm not sure if I or the College Board can prove my score at this point.
The Princeton Review promises a 200 point score improvement with some of their packages. And they can fairly-reliably achieve it too.
I think it's fair enough to say teenagers in general have more instability in their life even without this.
