Posted by seltzerboys 1 day ago
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.
I need the entire paragraph above just to _explain_ my GRE (decent) score because the test has changed yet again in the interim 20 years or so and I suspect the SAT is similar.
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
Another practical thing is that tests seem to trend substantially higher in difficulty when multiple choice. I was part of the first class at my university that took a calculus program which was multiple choice and we thought it was going to be a cake walk. But suddenly like every single test problem was using obscure trigonometric tricks on top of the basic calculus itself. And of course no partial credit for getting everything 95% right and missing one really disguised trig trick at the end. Grades for the class were significantly lower than prior years, because those tests were just nuts - and I'm a very much a math guy.
Ya, I quickly noticed that, and so didn't at all take for granted that a matching result was correct.
Here’s a source that contradicts you (first hit for Desmos SAT). One of the allowed calculators is the Desmos app built in to the testing program.
https://www.strategictestprep.com/post/is-desmos-dead-on-the...
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.
> For decades, the University of California’s use of discriminatory SAT and ACT scores deprived hundreds of thousands of well-qualified students of color, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities of the opportunity to pursue higher education in the nation’s preeminent public university system. Rather than provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college, SAT and ACT scores act as stand-ins for students’ wealth and race, and thus advantage more privileged applicants. Even University leaders admit that the tests are “racist” and “correlated to wealth and privilege.”
> Public Counsel and co-counsel brought this lawsuit on behalf of students and community organizations—Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising—challenging the University of California’s use of the SAT and ACT as discriminatory on the bases of race, wealth, and disability. In August 2020, Plaintiffs obtained a preliminary injunction requiring the University to immediately stop using the tests for undergraduate admissions and scholarship determinations. Plaintiffs then defeated the University’s attempts to prevent the injunction from taking effect. In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus.
Public Counsel is pretty clear that the legal theory they were originally operating under is that requiring SAT and ACT scores for university admission is racially discriminatory, and the specific races it's discriminatory against are the groups they characterize as "students of color", which we can take to mean primarily black and Latino students because they specifically mention the detail "In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus.".
Interestingly, the lawsuit was originally brought forward in late 2019, before the start of the COVID pandemic. The temporary injunction against using the SAT/ACT was imposed in August 2020, well into the pandemic, on the grounds that the pandemic conditions made it more difficult for applicants with disabilities to take standardized tests, in a way that was plausibly legally discriminatory - but of course this couldn't have been the primary legal justification that Public Counsel used when the brought the lawsuit in 2019, unless they were prescient enough to have predicted the course of the pandemic at that time (in my memory, the number of people in the Anglosphere who were paying attention to COVID-related news in China before the turn of 2020 and thought that it might develop into a concerning pandemic was incredibly small).
The settlement that the UC Regents reached in May 2021 lasted until Spring 2025, so it's only now that it's legally possible for the UC Regents to reconsider the ban on using the SAT/ACT for admissions. Presumably, Public Counsel and the other activist groups - Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising - haven't changed their opinion that the use of the SAT/ACT is racially discriminatory towards blacks and latinos. But they don't seem to have raised another lawsuit about this, perhaps because the political environment in the US has changed since 2020 in ways that make them less optimistic about their chances of success.
They could have reinstated the requirement last year, and they could have undertaken their recently-determined plan to engage in study regarding reinstatement anytime before that. They just couldn't remove the requirement until 2025.
Appreciate your detailed description of the lawsuit and settlement. This is what happens when two parties are settling a lawsuit but do not actually have adverse interests. They were aligned on wanting to get rid of it and signed an agreement to do so. That said, the Regents decided to get rid of it permanently, with no plan to bring it back or create any replacement test (as they had previously said they would do).
Would you want a pilot on your flight who flunked flying school exams, but somehow "really knew how to fly!"?
Your single example identifies a situation where we would want someone resilient to stress to pass the testing process.
However if you are evaluating someone's ability to identify characters in Shakespeare who are most closely representative of the Bard himself, a proctored exam may not be the only environment where that could be demonstrated.
Anyone in software knows as well that for a test to be effective it has to be written properly. In the history of academic and standardized testing however there has been little rigor in the construction of tests, and those who pass are ones who give the "right" answers regardless of whether those answers are true proofs of knowledge.
As for people who cannot perform under the stress of a test, how are they going to perform otherwise? Anyhow, the solution to test anxiety is to keep taking tests - the anxiety will recede.
For example, the first time I tried public speaking I was paralyzed. But I kept trying it, and the anxiety went away, and now I do a fair amount of public speaking and enjoy it very much.
What is the point of “knowledge” that can’t be demonstrated. How will that person demonstrate their knowledge of Shakespeare?
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.
> In my long career I've noticed a strong correlation between SAT scores and academic performance as well as job performance.
A test doesn't need to test the relevant skills for that, it just needs to test _something_ that correlates with academic performance and job success.
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.
Two kids who both went to the same school, were told the same things about the importance of the SAT and dedicated equal time to study and preparation can probably say that the difference in their scores is indicative of differences in intelligence.
But any two random students? There are so many factors that could cause students to underperform their hypothetical max score if they had perfect conditions in the months leading up to the test and day of.
I don't understand the effort to try to eliminate the reality that innate ability exists. I think we should accept this and work to cultivate it. Just because somebody of average aptitude doesn't mean he might not excel in other ways. The world needs all sorts of people, and I think the ideal system would work to figure out and cultivate these talents in everybody.
I never studied for tests in school, not for the SATs, either. I tried that in college, that did not work. The stress of the tests was pretty bad. I realized I had to study hard, and I did, and it was effective at reducing test anxiety.
Perhaps because they finally bothered to learn the material. I am skeptical that "strategy" makes much of any difference.
This is pedantic. Take it to the logical next step. Words and letters are symbols too. How would someone who can’t read do on the SAT?
> A mediocre student who had studied SAT-style questions for weeks leading up to the test would likely outperform a high IQ student who last solved those types of problems over a year prior.
Would make an interesting experiment, if it hasn’t already been studied. I would put my money on the lapsed high IQ student though.
But he was one in a million. I always felt like a moron around him. But Hal was also charismatic and everyone liked him, including myself.
I suspect Hal was a "skin job" alien.
That's why hard questions exist.
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.
The real issue is that standardized tests disenfranchise lower SES students less than any other metric.
Everyone who takes the SAT has to sit in the same room for the same amount of time answering the same questions. You can’t just pay someone else to take it for you (like essays) or select which difficulty level you take (like going to a prep school with grade inflation), or luck out in who your parents know (like recommendation letters).
Some may have better opportunities to learn the material, but, at the end of the day, you have to actually learn the material. There’s no getting around that.
As your own GRE anecdote shows: A little studying with some inexpensive books makes all the difference. Unless things have radically changed, a couple SAT or GRE test prep books are significantly less expensive than just one college textbook.
Bluntly, the reason SATs are better correlated to college performance than other measures are because of the reasons I mentioned. They strip away most of the privilege of coming from a high-SES family.
The guy who got into my uni class as #2 in that exam dropped out after a few semesters because he couldn't beat calculus. The #4 took several extra semesters to graduate despite not working/not interning. Several others in the top third struggled through. We had _maybe_ 2 or 3 guys who straight-A'd the entire major.
I myself got in as #17 and still failed a few courses. Thankfully no one cared throughout my professional career.
On average. However, I've also had the experience that some of the most competent people I've known had rather difficult teens and twenties.
Hiring someone who flunked out of highschool, worked odd jobs for 10 years, then got a diploma and a degree is higher risk, higher reward. They are often times harder workers, unusual thinkers and more grateful for what they have.
My wife has anxiety, and the time-limited, high-stakes, pass-or-fail nature of a test makes it much, much harder for her to perform well. Outside that context, she's blazingly intelligent, performs very well under real-world high-pressure situations, is extremely diligent at getting any other assigned work done well on time, and has repeatedly written the guidelines for processes and procedures in her jobs.
I'm the opposite in many ways. I generally do somewhat poorly in a classic classroom environment, primarily due to ADHD hampering my ability to get homework done regularly and on time. However, I test amazingly well. I consistently finish in 50-70% of the time of other students, with scores in the high 90% range. (In my jobs, I think I do pretty well.)
Naturally the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but I've known enough other people who fit both of our molds that I think it's fair to say that basing even a plurality of your assessment of someone purely on tests, especially standardised tests, is going to mislead you at least as often as not, in both directions.
That's it.
I did well on both tests and did well on my first semester. It's the semesters after where my performance tanked because I didn't have some of the work habits that solid B students had. (I will also be clear and say that at least some of the problem is attributable to the university and how it handled advisors. My advisor was completely useless and let me schedule for _way_ too much hard stuff.)
There was also a really good predictor of how one would do on the SAT or ACT: NoBitH. The Number of Bathrooms in the House.
Yup. The SAT and ACT at the time were better measures of economic advantage than innate intelligence. I have no reason to believe that this isn't still the case, especially since they're more entrenched in the system than ever.
But more to the point: If you do poorly in your first semester and drop out, then it doesn’t really matter if the SAT would have done a good job of predicting your second semester performance.
In addition to that, this claim is like the dragon in my garage thought experiment. It an unfalsifiable claim that they have “knowledge” but can’t demonstrate it.
Sure, just not in the cockpit
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.
"Academic tests involve academics"
"I'm not talking about academics!"
That about sum it up?
Of course you'd have refrained from making such a vacuous reply if you bothered to read the article.
Because both have been shown to have predictive power for success in college.
Maybe two.
> 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.
The question is whether a given test measures anything relevant - did your friend become a better programmer for doing 6 weeks of leetcodes? E.g. what kind of experience did he gain about large code bases and how to handle those? Continuing your analogy, would you fly with a pilot who drilled on taking off a bunch of time, but never practised flying in a storm?
I'm not saying leetcodes or exams are useless, but Goodhart's Law apply.
It's still worth discussing if the particular test is ideal, but the answer IMO is not to say let's remove tests in general.
He's the kind of person I'd want to hire.
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 IFT program 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.
Regardless, as a civilian, you do have to pass a written multiple-choice test on flying theory before you can solo. Any time you spend in the cockpit before passing that test will be under the supervision of a Certified Flight Instructor (CFI), in a plane with dual controls, and you are not acting a pilot-in-command.
So, although the parent may be slightly over-focused on the USAF way, I think it is fair to say that for any type of pilot training in the USA, you do have to complete academic ground training (including passing a formal written test) before you are truly “given the controls”.
I do not consider that flight training.
You goofed. A palm tree is not pedantically considered a tree. You made that up.
https://texastreesurgeons.com/blog/2025/01/03/palm-trees-are...
> odds are it came from a tree >> there are natural sources of wood that don't come from trees
Confirms I was correct.
> Each Module contains both a flight and ground lesson.
And the ground lesson comes first. I read your link.
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.
How would you calculate a crosswind component from the runway heading and reported wind speed and direction without trig? How would you think pilots measured their distance to non-directional beacons before GPS and DMEs existed?
How would you solve for fuel remaining without algebra? How would you estimate the best speed to fly with a given headwind to maximize fuel onboard at the intended destination without calculus?
A very basic principle of glider flying involves finding the tangent to a curve. Is calculus not applicable there?
Fuel consumption is often estimated by numerical integration of fuel flow rate. That doesn’t require an analytic solution of the integral, but I think most pilots have at least a passing familiarity with the concept.
> Furthermore it's categorically false that you need to pass ground school before you're allowed to fly.
I interpreted the parent’s statement to mean “before you fly solo.”
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.
but to get to the city we had to take it was a 2 hour long drive through twisted roads that made me carsick. I lived in a small town far away from the city. By the time I got there my breakfast I had quickly eaten gave me a stomach ache, I had woken up far earlier than usual and not gotten my 7 hours too. I certainly would have done a lot better if I had lived in the big city.
Another factor: if you wanted to pay the fee you could just take the test over and over again until you got a great score. So kids with poor parents obviously had a huge disadvantage. Also kids who had the time and money could study for it with prep books - I did, while some of my friends were flipping burgers while still in highschool. Its not surprising I got a higher score than them, but it said nothing about my intellegence or understanding compaired to theirs.
Also, in a decent number of states, it's mandatory for all HS students to take (and I believe free to students as a result).
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.
They experimented replacing tests in my country with giving teachers the final say- it was a fucking disaster. Human beings are quite terrible at objectivity.
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.
It's easy to find recent reporting on claimed grade inflation, reductions in rigor, and students who seem unprepared or unwilling to do the work at Harvard and Princeton too.
The SAT is a very imperfect measure but it turns out a lot of the others are even worse.
Putting a body every a seat for those profitable 500-person lectures taught by an adjunct and graded by TAs who are all paid peanuts and then having them wash out before those expensive 50-person high level classes and esoteric electives taught by tenured profs and accompanied by lots of expensive lab time is great for the university's bottom line though.
There are still some online courses that try to do this sort of thing, with a particular example being the University of Helsinky's Full Stack Open [0] which offers post-hoc university credits for those who complete the course, but it seems that the dream didn't quite materialize.
In the US, this would be a huge outlier.
Unless, somehow this is part of an advanced certification process? I really can’t imagine professionals not knowing how to study for an exam like this. Medical school shows what motivated people can do.
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 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?
* If 1/3 of calculus physics for engineers fail, they take it next semester.
* If 1/3 of gen-ed physics for poets fail, the professor better have a good explanation for the provost.
* If 1/3 of physics for pre-meds fail, the professor better have a pretty good home security system and might want to think about having the family stay in a hotel for a few weeks.
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.
I’m sure having access to your own SAT scores (or even remembering what they were) is highly predictive of not being someone who it would be illegal to fire because they are too old… which is probably the point… and why I’d expect most HR departments to shy away from this requirement.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, there isn't really a viable way to prevent employers from finding out your age from your resume/CV.
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.
Although that probably also outs your company at risk for age discrimination.
that's because the 2400 score included an 800 point writing component; the math and reading components remained scored at 800 points (and still do now)
/s
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 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.
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 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.
That would be an interesting experiment, post-interview ask each interviewer to guesstimate the candidate's SAT score.
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.
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.
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
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.