Job application asked for my SAT scores

https://mrmarket.lol/job-application-asked-for-my-sat-scores/

by seltzerboys • 1 month ago

162 385 1 month ago

"You're partly making your decision based on who someone was as a 17 year old."

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.

janalsncm• 1 month ago

Can you say the same for SAT tests, where the score is best of N and N is however many the person can afford and varies between candidates?

EgregiousCube2• 1 month ago

Yes; though SAT is less prep-resistant and it'd be smart to apply a "+/- 100pts" fuzz to a score.

z2• 1 month ago

And the meaning of the score changes over the years based on the test itself changing. Same goes for the company's GPA requirements where there have clearly been shifts across schools on the amount of grade inflation allowed or even encouraged.

As an aside, I'm not sure if I or the College Board can prove my score at this point.

Hax0r778• 1 month ago

Not only that, but the SAT is not an IQ test and you can definitely study for it. Students with wealthy or motivated parents can get study books or tutors which makes a huge difference in score.

The Princeton Review promises a 200 point score improvement with some of their packages. And they can fairly-reliably achieve it too.

prpl• 1 month ago

SAT isn’t an IQ test, and probably all sorts of people took it before they had cultural awareness or a diagnosis that would have lead to different testing conditions had it been taken after diagnosis, let alone the fact that test scores are not comparable.

GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.

porridgeraisin2• 1 month ago

While edge cases may exist, for the most part, a test score / GPA / anything where the numerator is almost as big as the denominator is a good signal.

spullara2• 1 month ago

SAT isn't an IQ test but IQ is very correlated with SAT scores.

patmcc• 1 month ago

SAT isn't a perfect IQ test but it's not bad for a first-pass filter. Nearly all who scored 1600 will be bright and nearly all who score 800 won't be.

It's a bit like BMI. Yes, if you're Peter Dinklage or Arnold Schwarzenegger it will be pretty meaningless. But most people aren't and BMI works pretty well for them.

quux0r• 1 month ago

I dislike this argument. I think in some dimensions these types of tests can work, but I’ve never been the type of person who’s been able to score well, and I don’t test particularly well in general, yet I did my PhD work at <IVY LEAGUE> and have had a great career despite this. I think that testing is good for people who can be adequately evaluated, but for people like me it just leads to a lifetime of feeling like something’s wrong with you.

beambot• 1 month ago

Test-taking may only roughly correlate to intelligence, and is just one dimension of a human... but they likely care less about false negatives (like you) than they do about false positives in alternative assessments.

nephihaha2• 1 month ago

I can't speak for others here and we don't have SATs in this country, but these things can be very unfair. When I was seventeen, I had a lot of things to deal with which were not of my own making, such as caring for a terminally ill relative and wondering if I would even have a roof over my head a few months down the line. That kind of thing tends to take your mind off school work. Several years later and I was in a much better place.

I think it's fair enough to say teenagers in general have more instability in their life even without this.

sokoloff4• 1 month ago

If you think it matters (I don’t) and think you scored unfairly low at 17, you can take (or retake) the SAT at any age.

sdevonoes2• 1 month ago

I never done an iq test, but just curious, can’t one simply “rehearse/study” for such tests? I dunno, let’s say you do a few past IQ tests (with answers available), I guess one could get a higher score just by doing that

LPisGood3• 1 month ago

You can. IQ scores are not stable throughout one’s life.

gedy2• 1 month ago

I'd rather that than leet code dancing around: "It's not an IQ test, since those are bad, but this is okay though!"

annzabelle8• 1 month ago

My problem is it's self reported, so it ends up being a "are they smart or did they lie?" game. You can't easily verify it for anybody over 23 or so.

Canonical has a job application where you are supposed to rank yourself on a percentile (up to like 1 in 10,000) on how good you were at math in high school. It's a very easy way to incentivize lying, and also to hire people with an excessively high appraisal of themselves. There are a lot of people who are reasonably good at math, and have avoided humbling environments like the Putnam, and have convinced themselves they are God's gift to math, when in reality they were just the brightest kid in a class of 100 high school students.

gedy2• 1 month ago

Fair enough, but the vast majority companies that interview like this would be totally fine with the brightest 1 of 100, if not the top 20 of 100.

amazingamazing• 1 month ago

Company is Alpha Vantage:

https://beaverhand.com/apply/alpha-vantage-gtm-team-various-...

OptionOfT2• 1 month ago

Please note that we will also rely significantly on both solicited references (where you introduce us) as well as unsolicited or "back-end" references (where we do our own). For the latter, please rest assured that we will never contact a current employer without first getting your permission.

References already give me goosebumps. Having them reach out to people who haven't given you permission to be a reference sounds like a recipe for disaster.

mc32• 1 month ago

If they do sensitive work for the government, it'd make sense that they'd do those back-end references. Also if they are in high end finance where you want to weed out people who have demonstrated moral flexibility was well as total lack of it for certain things.

jedberg4• 1 month ago

Every job does that, whether they tell you or not.

parpfish• 30 days ago

i hate references.

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.

F7F7F7• 1 month ago

The job description touts investment from some members of the "PayPal Mafia." For some odd reason that fact that and the SAT requirement combine to make this whole thing feel kind of normal.

dominotw• 1 month ago

airbnb asked me why i didnt go iit in india and interviever soured after that. it was a chinese guy.

thisislife22• 1 month ago

Seriously? This made me lol.

dataviz1000• 30 days ago

Low ego: There can be significant economic upside to this role as things progress, but the nature of this role day-to-day may involve things that can be less exciting / more mundane (it's a job, after all!)

What does this mean?

skirmish• 30 days ago

Have to make sure all coworker's coffee cups are full.

Dilettante_2• 30 days ago

"I'm the boss, you do what I tell you when I tell you. I say jump out the window, you ask which one."

energy123• 30 days ago

No way! These guys stole my money a while back. But it was too small (less than $100) to pursue through criminal/civil.

annzabelle8• 1 month ago

Canonical?

Heard nothing but bad things about their hiring process.

monkpit• 1 month ago

wild to call out a random org like that…

annzabelle8• 1 month ago

Look at any of their job applications, they're all like this:

https://canonical.com/careers/3752633/application

samtheDamned• 1 month ago

They're known for asking odd questions like "how did you perform in math in high school" and "please justify your performance in math in high school". It was actually my guess as well before I read the post.

LtWorf3• 1 month ago

They made me do an online, timed IQ test, stressing that I should take it in my native language to not waste precious seconds understanding it in english.

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.

tb99• 1 month ago

Sneaky age filter? You must be young enough to remember your SAT scores.

reaperducer4• 1 month ago

Sneaky age filter? You must be young enough to remember your SAT scores.

I can remember mine just fine.

If you're really looking for smart people, use "Answer this word problem in two or more paragraphs. Write your answer on the sheet of paper provided. In cursive."

crooked-v• 1 month ago

"In cursive" is just filtering for people old enough to have been taught cursive.

margalabargala5• 1 month ago

Are people who were forced to learn cursive smarter? They're just older.

Doing this may well expose you to age discrimination lawsuits, since it's just sneaky indirect age filtering.

Another example would be if you required a minimum SAT score of 1601. Sure, someone could have gone off and taken the SAT as an adult or a young child but in reality it is mainly an age filter.

consensus13• 1 month ago

The signal being that the smart people will refuse to jump through this hoop in your inane process because they have a lot of other opportunities to choose from.

khuey• 1 month ago

Having to write the "I did not cheat" pledge in cursive was the most difficult part of the SAT for me.

boredatoms• 1 month ago

Sneaky immigration filter? Most wont have an SAT score at all

nostrademons• 1 month ago

I remember mine (both from when I was 12 and when I was 17) close to 30 years later.

jedberg4• 1 month ago

Hah, you did the one at 12 also? I too remember both, and it was also 30 years ago. I don't know why, probably because they were really important numbers to teenagers, and they say you remember things that happened to you as a teen more than any other part of your life.

hamdingers• 1 month ago

Between 2005 and 2015 the maximum score was 2400 instead of 1600. Assuming anyone who got <1600 during that period wouldn't admit it, you now have three well defined buckets.

But of course this is a lot of unnecessary steps compared to the usual method: length of work and education history +18 years.

tayo42• 30 days ago

The extra 800 points didn't count for a few years, I didn't practice for it and as expected did bad. Don't remeber the score except I did well enough on math

seibelj• 1 month ago

It’s an approximation for an IQ test

alephnerd6• 1 month ago

As I mentioned elsewhere on HN [0], younger generations are much more competitive now.

Visit and talk with undergrads at a top CS program like Stanford, Cal, UIUC, MIT, etc. The culture is different because this is a much more competitive generation. When the acceptance rate into a top CS program is in the 1-5% range and laurels like being a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity sports team member in HS, getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT, and taking 6-7 APs are now table stakes, you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.

This mindset is the norm across Asia though - from the Gaokao to the JEE to SKY-or-bust. Honestly, I'm glad that younger generations are much more competitive now - pressure makes diamonds.

And honestly, the top 40-50 STEM programs nationally graduate around 30-40k new grads a year. Add to that respected regional programs and Veteran-to-Employment pipelines and you have a self-sustaining talent pipeline.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506001

annzabelle8• 1 month ago

I disagree with the increase in competitiveness being a good thing. Excessive filtering at all levels has meant that eccentrics or absent minded professor types are not making it into research roles, and creatives or mad geniuses are filtered out before they have the chance to make an impact. There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions.

The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity.

alephnerd6• 1 month ago

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.

porridgeraisin2• 1 month ago

Not really. Outliers of that sort get dealt with as an exceptional case and it works. I've seen amazingly bright batchmates get into all sorts of programs without most of the qualifications, because they were a genuine math wizard (the kind that submitted errata to a standard textbook on some weird number theory stuff at age 15), but they didn't always score the best on many exams, especially when aggregated across subjects. IIRC he's a researcher now. All trends point to him being an eccentric old hag at age 50 ;)

The filtering system is meant for the majority case and there it works. The outliers get dealt with as outliers, which also works. In this case, he later asked the author of that textbook who he emailed with the errata, to connect him with the group he wanted to work in. Needless to say it was a very strong referral.

cyberax5• 1 month ago

The US education has always been competitive. In sports.

Its school system has always been a state-sponsored daycare.

SAT/ACT tests reflect this. I can get a perfect score in SAT math easily. And I likely could 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.

tmule• 1 month ago

“ getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT” Typo? 2100/2400 << 1500/1600 in terms of rarity.

neilv• 1 month ago

[...] you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution

I think there's a lot of truth to that. (Aside: Many manage without the viciousness part. It's not their fault their parents lined them up with an internship and a research paper co-author in high school, and they're not jerks about it.)

Though the current generation of students didn't invent hyper-competitive. Before software engineering jobs (and startups) were high-income and high-status, you'd see that mentality among many people on track for Wall Street, for example.

Another example: Before CS was a go-to for the hyper-competitive, a mentor of mine actually switched from pre-med to CS, at an Ivy, because a percentage of pre-med students were outright sabotaging other students, and it turned him off of the field.

that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.

Though, there have been -- and hopefully will remain to be -- people doing it for the love of the field, who are not impressed.

Other than the genuine people being crowded out of admissions slots and fratbro interviews by Wall Street types...

If a Palo Alto helicopter-parented overachiever McDojo black belt tries to pick a fight... with a humble rope-belted person in Asia, who's studied martial arts for the love of it... the latter will chuckle good-naturedly, and help the Californian up off the ground.

LPisGood3• 1 month ago

a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity sports team member in HS, getting a 2100/1500+ on the SAT, and taking 6-7 APs are now table stakes

This is very true in my experience, except I subbed out Valedictorian with multiple varsity sports/student government and the SAT with ACT and I didn’t even get waitlisted at top schools.

cute_boi3• 30 days ago

Extreme competition isn't good. It will just lead to race to bottom.

caminanteblanco2• 1 month ago

I just applied to Epic, the EHR company from Wisconsin, and I can confirm that they also ask for SAT scores. Thankfully I have my collegeboard credentials saved

LPisGood3• 1 month ago

Their pre-screen test was awful. Brain teasers, including some infamous ones like “if you have two coins that make 15 cents and one is not a nickel, how is this possible,” and moderately involved programming questions like “parse phone numbers from a file and record those with any of these area codes OR every other digit is a 2 OR they have multiple pairs of consecutive digits” and you’re given a blank text box with no formatting, IDE, or even non-word processing style indentation help.

caminanteblanco2• 1 month ago

Thankfully, the coding assessment does have syntax highlighting for plenty of languages, but in general I feel like face-to-face assessments are more productive. TFA seems to make a similar point

apparent22• 1 month ago

Out of curiosity, did they require SATs, or just ask? And how many years out of HS are you? Seems like it would be crazy to ask for them once someone has finished college and has a UGPA to report.

bitwize2• 1 month ago

I see we (as a society) are now full Primeagen: "Epic as in health records, not Epic as in Fortnite."

OptionOfT2• 1 month ago

This by default includes a whole bunch of people who didn't take any kind of standardized tests (most notably, immigrants).

The (albeit small) country I'm from doesn't do any. Reasoning was that standardized tests create an environment where teaching is merely done to create good test scores, not to actually teach.

gmadsen• 1 month ago

The SAT doesn’t test course material. It is literally just applying middle school math and English proficiency.

aidenn05• 1 month ago

Starting in 2016 College Board said that they were aligning the test with Common Core, so this might not be true any more.

apparent22• 1 month ago

It's not just middle school math. It covers geometry and algebra 2, which very few students complete in middle school.

ogou• 1 month ago

I have seen company descriptions in job ads that list college achievements of founders. They are invariably young Asian men. I understand that it's a cultural signifier and don't judge them. But, I also understand that I will never hear back from them because I don't share that background. So, I never apply to any job listing that references college experience of either side, other than wanting a degree in general.

georgeecollins• 1 month ago

I think it is a positive for an employer to ask for an SAT because it tells me right away I don't want to work for them. Once (a long time ago) I tried to upload my resume to apply for a job. The web page started asking me very basic questions, like a basic aptitude test. I was out. Tell me you do not know how to find and evaluate talent!

apparent22• 1 month ago

I think this is highly age-dependent. I took the SAT well over a decade ago and have significant work experience since then. It would be odd to require me to put down my SAT scores, which I don't even precisely remember.

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.

aprdm2• 1 month ago

You basically described Canonical's hiring process !

JackFr• 1 month ago

It was required at my first job in 1989, for entry level actuaries.

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.

LewisVerstappen• 1 month ago

The filter works both ways so it makes sense. Those employers do not want to hire people like you either.

thisislife22• 1 month ago

Someone once told me that American work culture used to be based more on intern-ship / apprentice type hiring but now obsess with formal degrees. I wonder how much of this shift in culture is influenced by the Korean, Chinese and Indian immigrants, as a formal education is a prerequisite to compete in these countries' job market? For example, it is quite common in India for employers to ask for our 10th and 12th standard marks / grade (because these are national exams) along with college grades - to apparently gauge "Consistency". Fluctuating performance, a break or dropout years all negatively impact you and can be nerve wracking for many freshers, until they manage to get some work experience. It is somewhat disappointing to see this culture permeate to America too, even though I feel quite conflicted about it - after all, everyone does want to hire the best / most competent / reliable candidate; but the other approach - a vocational kind of training - also has its merits and seems to have served American companies well too. (Zoho in India is experimenting with this kind of hiring in India where they are hiring high-school students, mainly from rural areas, and offering them a work cum study program. They don't get any formal diploma or degree though - https://www.zohoschools.com/ ).

rayiner3• 1 month ago

I wonder how much of this shift in culture is influenced by the Korean, Chinese and Indian immigrants

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.

firstplacelast• 30 days ago

I don't think other cultures are driving much of the trend for educational check marks. I remember my dad and uncle talking about the awkwardness of being asked where they did their MBA's by colleagues/clients in the late 90s/early 00's and them trying to figure out how to navigate that as they didn't even have bachelors degrees. And I doubt whoever replaced them when they retired had less than an MBA.

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.

onetimeusename2• 30 days ago

I have suspected the influence is real. For a reference point, the majority of students at top tier US universities are Asian at this point, broadly. Not every top tier university but there's a trend to have about 30-40% Asian American students and then roughly 1/3 international which is heavily weighted toward China and India. This constitutes the largest group usually. So it's quite likely that universities adapt to this and hiring practices begin to reflect an intense interest in exam taking and credentials.

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.

delichon• 1 month ago

Last month 2,400 University of California faculty asked for admissions to resume using the SAT "to ensure foundational fluency." Of course many employers want to ensure that too, especially when college degrees don't anymore.

  The widening abilities gap followed the 2020 elimination of the SAT/ACT, a temporary measure that has now become a permanent vulnerability. This outcome was explicitly predicted by the Academic Senate’s 2020 Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF) report, which warned that removing these tests would eliminate a vital predictor of college success and obscure the impact of severe high-school grade inflation. Unfortunately, the outcomes cautioned against in that report have now materialized in the data across our campuses. All other leading STEM institutions, including the UC’s primary peers, have resumed using SAT/ACT in their admissions to ensure foundational fluency. For the University of California to remain a global leader in STEM, it is essential to restore these objective benchmarks. -- https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessm...

doctorpangloss3• 1 month ago

how many elected leaders are in STEM? would high SAT scores and grades exclude many US presidents and congressmen? (yes) winning elections seems kind of important to me. so if you were just like, selecting for leadership - and many of our leaders are brilliant people, just not in the sense of being good at taking tests - would that be good or bad? or... what is your real opinion? what are you actually mad about?

obviously the UC system should give spots to the kids who will use those spots the best. but it is very hard to define what "using spots the best" means.

lern_too_spel3• 1 month ago

We certainly don't want them to fail out, which is what is happening. Berkeley reported 10% failure rate in the intro CS course and 35% in the pre-intro course. https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...

WalterBright30• 30 days ago

not in the sense of being good at taking tests

The trick to doing well on the SATs is to pay attention in class.

jimbokun7• 30 days ago

In the US or China?

lern_too_spel3• 1 month ago

SAT score is known to be predictive of college grades. Is it also predictive for whether a mid-to-late career candidate will pass a phone screen? It is used for early career candidate filtering in finance, but I have not heard of anybody caring beyond that because of the availability of signal on the actual tasks they will be performing.

consensus13• 1 month ago

It is correlated tightly with IQ, so yes it will likely be a strong predictive signal for passing a phone screen.

cute_boi3• 1 month ago

Is it also predictive for whether a mid-to-late career candidate will pass a phone screen?

The answer is probably no. I got many friend they got good marks in SAT, but they were average.

labcomputer5• 30 days ago

Is it also predictive for whether a mid-to-late career candidate will pass a phone screen?

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.

apparent22• 1 month ago

The UC faculty opposed the SAT requirement being discarded in the first place. They were overruled by the UC Regents, and that may happen again. And even if the SAT is brought back, I'm sure it will be given much less weight and subjected to the "in a local context" process in the name of equity.

WalterBright30• 30 days ago

I took the SAT 50 some years ago. I kinda doubt I would do so well on it today without doing remedial prep work on the math.

everybodyknows• 30 days ago

Regents are selected by Sacramento. At bottom, it's a political failure.

JuniperMesos• 30 days ago

"Equity" is still something of a euphemism - the specific reason that the UC Regents got rid of the SAT requirement is because the non-profit law firm Public Counsel, along with a consortium of other non-profits and activist organizations, sued the UC system ostensibly on behalf of several students; and the UC Regents ended up agreeing to a settlement where they would not use SAT or ACT scores for admissions until after 2025. Public Counsel brags about the details of the lawsuit on their website (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...):

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.

WalterBright30• 30 days ago

I always enjoy the advocates who claim that students have mastered their subjects, but "don't test well".

Would you want a pilot on your flight who flunked flying school exams, but somehow "really knew how to fly!"?

Maxatar12• 30 days ago

Not really comparable... the overwhelming majority of flight tests involve flying an aircraft. There is no meaningful way someone can be excellent at flying an aircraft but can't pass a test which involves flying an aircraft.

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.

andrecarini2• 30 days ago

My understanding is you're equating `failing a test` to `lacking the relevant skills and knowledge to do a certain task competently`.

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.

hammock6• 30 days ago

Would you want a pilot on your flight who flunked flying school exams, but somehow "really knew how to fly!

Sure, just not in the cockpit

chasd003• 30 days ago

I would be much more ok with someone who failed the test but knew how to pilot a plane vs someone who aced the test but can’t figure out how to get the engine started.

Morromist3• 30 days ago

I did very well with my SAT

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.

sir00100103• 30 days ago

No, but it'd probably be okay if the pilot flunked their SATs.

FatherOfCurses• 29 days ago

It's not a claim, there is psychological data supporting the negative impact stress can have on recall and that for some students a test is not the best way to identify their retained knowledge.

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.

mangodrunk2• 29 days ago

I agree with you. The real world is stressful or less than ideal for many reasons and we have to apply our knowledge within that context.

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.

eikenberry2• 30 days ago

Why is a lossy testing filter better than just failing out those who can't make it? Maybe allow for larger freshmen classes and smaller latter classes or adopt community colleges and have all students start there and advance into the UC system sophomore year on. Instead they bring back what is basically an IQ test for admission.

bigthymer• 30 days ago

From the students' perspective, it is better to not be allowed in than fail out midway through. One test is cheaper than years in college.

stephenbez• 30 days ago

High graduation rates are an important metric to administrators. If a professor gave a failing grade to 1/3 of the class they would be in hot water.

paytonjjones• 30 days ago

Apply the same question to jobs and it's easy to see: why is a lossy [interview] filter better than just [firing] those who can't make it?

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.

BobbyJo3• 30 days ago

If you completely ignore costs, and the negative affects of having 50+% of a class be unprepared and taking time from the other students, sure, that would work great. Seems like a bad alternative to standardized tests considering students will then have to pass tests once in college...

jimbokun7• 30 days ago

Because it’s a complete waste of time and money for both those students and the instructors.

brightball• 30 days ago

It’s frustrating when easily predicted outcomes are ignored for the sake of feel good policy.

expedition322• 29 days ago

The ironic thing is that feel good policy can be more racist and prejudiced than any test.

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.

jdkee• 30 days ago

Griggs v. Duke, 401 U.S. 424 (1971).

cm20122• 1 month ago

I would never ask for them since its so cringe. But SAT scores correlate to IQ at .81, and IQ is one of the few things that strongly correlates to knowledge work performance positively. There is probably a lot of alpha from knowing candidates SAT scores. Its more useful than knowing the college they went to.

doctorpangloss3• 1 month ago

and IQ is one of the few things that strongly correlates to knowledge work performance positively

i think you mean that it correlates to pay. nobody knows what you mean by "knowledge work performance." reviews of your peers also correlated with pay. often it is not the smartest person who is the most popular. so... do you see how you said something kind of meaningless?

margalabargala5• 1 month ago

nobody knows what you mean by "knowledge work performance"

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.

cm20122• 1 month ago

Nope, I meant what I said.

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.

Balgair• 30 days ago

That's r = 0.81 right? so R2 would then be ~.66. Meaning that 66% of the variation in IQ scores can be statistically explained by variation in SAT scores.

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.

TMWNN• 30 days ago

I would never ask for them since its so cringe. But SAT scores correlate to IQ at .81

The combination of these two phrases is the equivalent to "I hate Trump, but ..." in another context.

KevinMS• 29 days ago

Nothing is worse than a smart bad programmer. There's no limit to the technical debt they can pile up.

ludicrousdispla• 29 days ago

Is it really that hard to assess someone's intelligence after talking with them for half an hour?

That would be an interesting experiment, post-interview ask each interviewer to guesstimate the candidate's SAT score.

sdevonoes2• 1 month ago

If you want the job, can’t you just lie? Or are SAT scores something that cannot be faked? I dunno, I also say I know Kotlin when I have more experience in Java (and honestly I couldn’t care less about specific tech stacks), or that I know about tcp/udp when all I have is read a couple of (good) books about it.

I don’t feel bad lying about some stupid requirement

apparent22• 1 month ago

If you want the job, can’t you just lie? Or are SAT scores something that cannot be faked?

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.

burnte• 1 month ago

I like it. I also like it when companies ask for 10 years of [5 year old technology] experience, or say "there's more to working here than the salary!", or other red flags that make it easy to move to the next listing.

If you think my decades old SAT score is relevant, then I know all I need to know about your company.

sokoloff4• 1 month ago

I only had one company (D. E. Shaw & Co.) ask for my SAT scores. I was late-20s and had to have the recruiter repeat herself two more times before I understood what she was asking.

It was also the single highest density of talent I’ve ever worked, by a long shot. Crazy talented coworkers.

jleyank5• 1 month ago

I would think it an inappropriate question if you're asking a PhD (or MS). You could just ask for a copy of the paper(s) or the dissertation/thesis. Some people improve over the time in the uni environment. Some people don't test well when they're bored, etc. Some just grow up.

buildsjets3• 1 month ago

You cannot use the SAT as a metric to compare different cohorts. SAT scoring has been revised many times over the years. When I took it the highest possible score was 1600. From 2004 through 2016 the highest score was 2400. Now it is back to 1600 again. Plus, both the content and the format of the exam has changed many times over the years. At times, there was no essay requirement, at times the essay was required, and at times it was optional. Hence, each year the examination produces a different distribution/histogram of scores even if you normalize the 1600 vs 2400 difference.

DenverR• 1 month ago

You can look at historical percentile by year and score though.

giantrobot• 1 month ago

Which requires them to explicitly ask your age outside the bounds of qualification for a job (over 18 etc). Which ends up opening them to age discrimination lawsuits.

jedberg4• 1 month ago

The scores have changed, but ideally they are asking for the percentiles. Those are scaled to the current year.

hardtke• 1 month ago

Even the scaled score is not that informative (and perhaps crosses the line on age discrimination) because for older workers the population of people taking the SAT was much smaller as a percentage of high school grads (and presumably weighted towards higher IQs). It's also why there were so many fewer perfect SAT scores -- smaller population in the bell curve.

____tom____3• 30 days ago

I somehow doubt that the people that would ask for SAT scores would actually be the sort to think about how those numbers should most effectively be used.

tzs• 30 days ago

Paid test prep is generally considered to be more effective on the current SAT than it was several years ago which also makes it harder to compare across years.

buildsjets3• 30 days ago

Don’t make stuff up to defend this practice. The original poster only said the employer asked for the score, not the percentile.

rayiner3• 1 month ago

Yeah they’re much easier now.

varun_ch• 30 days ago

When I took the digital SAT a couple years ago, we had access to the Desmos Graphing Calculator during the whole math section.

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.

solid_fuel• 29 days ago

Got a source for that, bud?

jimbokun7• 30 days ago

Sure but if you also give the year they can work out the percentile for your cohort.

Although that probably also outs your company at risk for age discrimination.

zx8080• 30 days ago

But numbers are so easy to compare! Don't take this joy from HRs and recruiters!

insane_dreamer• 30 days ago

When I took it the highest possible score was 1600. From 2004 through 2016 the highest score was 2400. Now it is back to 1600 again.

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)

Izkata2• 29 days ago

Even during that time the writing component was optional. I took it twice, once with and once without.

obviouslynotme• 1 month ago

They are obviously using the SAT as a safer alternative to the legally dubious practice of IQ testing which can lead to running afoul of the ADA and EEOC. I'm not sure it's much safer, but I am positive it's less safe than doing timed leetcode. At least leetcode problems can be painted as relating to the job.

Additionally, the SAT is a shitty IQ test that is constantly crammed for and cheated on. I remember my SAT test. I was the only person in the room not openly cheating. The teacher proctor didn't care. Higher scores mean better students, more funds, higher home prices, bonuses, and a litany of secondary effects. That's not even including people that pay professional test-takers to do it for them.

The software industry needs to let go of their obsession with finding 10X ROCKSTAR L33T programmers. They never will though. It has gotten worse every few years for decades, and the problems are almost entirely managerial.

slashdave• 1 month ago

Higher scores mean better students, more funds, higher home prices, bonuses, and a litany of secondary effects.

Sounds like an IQ test

tptacek4• 1 month ago

IQ testing isn't legally dubious. The idea that it is is an Internet myth. There are a couple household-name corporations that administer general cognitive tests for candidates for some roles.

More companies don't do it because it doesn't work well.

tjwebbnorfolk3• 30 days ago

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but every job interview is a derivative IQ test. That includes leetcode.

LtWorf3• 30 days ago

Canonical is doing IQ testing (with very crappy tests, see my other comment). Not sure if that is because SAT doesn't exist everywhere.

nitwit005• 1 month ago

I'm surprised they didn't at least attempt to email them to ask why.

Ignorance is always a possibility here, as it might be their first time hiring.

jawns• 1 month ago

As a manager, there are several qualities that I value highly in an engineer, and they all happen to begin with the letter C: Competent, Consistent, Curious, Caring, and Clear Communicators.

While SAT scores might act as a proxy for competency and possibly curiosity, they're not going to tell you much about whether the person is consistently reliable, whether they care about others and cooperate well, or whether their vocabulary or literary analysis skills have any correlation with their ability to read the room and tailor their communication to their audience.

If I were giving these job posters the benefit of the doubt, I would guess they're including this requirement for the same reason that musicians request particular colors of M&Ms in their riders. They want to weed out people (or bots) who aren't paying attention. Nevertheless, there are better ways to do that than demanding (and presumably filtering by) teenage performance metrics.

analog31• 1 month ago

C = Competitiveness.

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.

jimbokun7• 30 days ago

In the same sense that the high school quarterback continues to talk about the Big Game now that he’s an overweight retail employee making minimum wage years later.

WalterBright30• 30 days ago

I've seen what happens in engineering with those with low SAT math scores. They need others to do the math for them, or they just wing it.

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.

boring_twenties4• 30 days ago

The problem here seems to be that the person was unwilling or unable to ask for help when they needed it, not that they don't know math per se.

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 :)

denotational3• 30 days ago

Off-topic, but can an RC circuit really reduce noise? I can see how it would reduce distortion (which is not the same as noise), but adding passives is surely going to increase thermal noise?

sinuhe69• 30 days ago

You forgot that the SAT requirement is not exclusive but an additional data point. While I agree that it could narrow the path for truly good employees, I’d argue that an additional data point like SAT (+ GPA) could tell the employer a lot about consistency of the applicants. Or at least an interesting talking point (“I see you got a very high SAT score but your GPA was lower, what happened?”), if they care.

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.

buildsjets3• 1 month ago

The SAT vs ACT preference map on Wikipedia is something I had not seen before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAT-ACT-Preference-Map.sv...

OkayPhysicist2• 1 month ago

I took both (since I could just use whichever I scored better on for applications), and the ACT is a much less miserable format. The test is broken up into much larger time chunks, meaning I could take a more useful nap after finishing a 50 minute section in 20 minutes than I could finishing a 20 minute section in 8.

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.

tjwebbnorfolk3• 30 days ago

In Virginia, I had never heard of the ACT until I got to college

JohnMakin2• 1 month ago

Take-home projects or a trial period of some kind. This makes the most intuitive sense by far: having candidates do a representative slice of the job gives you a solid idea of whether they'd be any good at it. Combining this with structured interviews was (before AI) considered a gold standard; you'd get a sense of who they are and how they work by talking, have a way to compare them pretty objectively to other candidates because of the structured and consistent nature of the interview process, and then you'd get a sense of how they apply their attributes practically to the job via the work exercise.

Unfortunately a lot of companies have over the last several years been using this to get candidates to do a project for free for them. If it's going to take more than a few hours of my time, I don't take project style interviews seriously unless compensation is added (which some companies do offer and is a big green flag).

Definitely been tricked into working for free a time or two.

OkayPhysicist2• 1 month ago

Best middle ground I ever had was an interview where they impose a strict 1 hour (maybe it was 90 minutes, idk) time limit between when I got the prompt and when I emailed them back. Then they spent some time looking over it, then I had an interview with an engineer who had read my code and we chatted about it. Why I had made certain decisions, what corners were cut because of the time limit, etc.

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.

JohnMakin2• 30 days ago

This style works for me too. I don’t necessarily think the live coding interview is always the best presentation of what I know and some types of interviewers try to apply pressure in those situations I don’t feel is entirely fair, plus you’re often forced to use a third party webapp where it’s entirely out of the normal workstation flow I’d be more comfortable in (I use mostly text editors with plugins when allowed).

there has been a proliferation of “take home” exercises that are them just trying to pick your brain for problems they’re struggling with. I have had a “take home” project that led to a trial contract employment that required me doing a ton of work for free I knew they had used later, because I saw the trial API key I had set up for the project used much later on down the line. Never got paid, clearly work was stolen, not much you can do about it and there’s a real power imbalance there that’s difficult to really do much about. Was a tough lesson. When done right I think it’s the best way to screen for good candidates that may not be good live coding interviewers.

I do take the position that like, I get why you may have a culture where live pair programming in high pressure situations may be valued. But in most orgs the async nature of -> get requirement -> implement asynchronously -> seek feedback and adjustments -> iterate is far more realistic, but when you deliver something, never hear back, get hit with the whole “we’re going with another candidate” feedback feels like you just got ripped off.

xantronix• 1 month ago

A lot of responses pointing out various flaws with this question, including the fact that it can be used as a proxy for ageism, the fact that the grading scale has not been consistent over time, or that most foreigners will not have gone through the US education system. However, is it really that uncommon for Americans to never have had reason to take the SAT/ACT, such as, simply not going to uni, or going straight to work after graduating high school?

pkaye• 30 days ago

You only need to SAT/ACT for going to get into an university. And these days it seems to matter less. I looked it up and less than 50% of high school students take the SAT/ACT. Personally I never had any employer ask for my SAT/ACT scores since the 90s.

DANmode• 1 month ago

I’ll do you one better:

I was denied a role with a major engineering firm based on my 3.something GPA!

They needed a 3.4 or 3.5.

aidenn05• 1 month ago

Many years ago I was walking around a college job fair when a recruiter was yelling at a college student. His crime: "wasting everybody's time" by presenting a Resume with a 3.4 GPA when the company clearly listed a 3.5 GPA as the minimum they would accept.

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.

tjwebbnorfolk3• 30 days ago

I remember the Cisco (!!) table was the most popular table at the campus job fair, and they turned away anyone without a 3.8+ GPA. I had a 2.42 (2.40 was minimum degree requirement).

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.

apparent22• 1 month ago

Why would you ask for a self-reported, unverifiable test score that could be decades old at this point?

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.

dragonwriter• 1 month ago

> Why would you ask for a self-reported, unverifiable test score that could be decades old at this point?
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/...

apparent22• 1 month ago

I am aware that third parties can't request scores. I was referring to the employer asking to have the scores sent, which the applicant would be compelled to do (or look like they fudged their original score reporting).

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).

assimpleaspossi• 1 month ago

When I graduated in the 1970s, and looked for my first job, it was expected that some company might ask for such scores and, iirc, one did.

tamimio• 1 month ago

One of the least effective predictors was unstructured interviews or 'chats’

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.

paradox460• 1 month ago

I've been talking to a few companies lately, and one just keeps stringing it along, having me talk to manager after manager. It's been 6 weeks, and still no end in sight

jedberg4• 1 month ago

Another thing making a comeback -- reference checks. I had to supply references for my first job in 1999. Then I wasn't asked for them again until 2024, and then for every job after that.

bitwize2• 1 month ago

Whatchoo talkin about, Willis? I've had to supply references for every job I've had.

Somehow it seems every other hackernews was living in a much better timeline, job-wise, than I during the ZIRP era.

infamouscow2• 1 month ago

If it's been 10+ years and an employer wants your SAT scores, 1600 is as good an answer as any. Anyone asking for that data point doesn't actually care about the accuracy, they just want to see if you'll compliantly jump through a pointless hoop.

(Save the "but that's fraud!" replies. It's not material to the job, so it isn't).

apparent22• 1 month ago

That cost-benefit analysis makes no sense if you had a pretty good scores. What's the point in fudging a few extra points if it means that diligence reveals you to be a liar?

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.

infamouscow2• 30 days ago

In service to the point, if you're _really_ smart—like definitely going to grad school smart—you apply to universities with the best faculty for your intended area of study. Often that is a sole professor at a university you've never heard of, but the researchers in that area of study regard as a top school.

aidenn05• 1 month ago

I had a friend with an MS show up for first-day of work for a job that asked for SAT scores on the application. HR said "we never got documentation for your SAT scores, can you provide that?" He was on the phone with his mother, having her go through a filing cabinet when he realized that he didn't want to work for a company that was this serious about SAT scores when hiring someone with a post-graduate degree.

apparent22• 1 month ago

That does seem wild. Out of curiosity, did he also have to submit GRE scores, which would be closer in time and more representative of his current knowledge/skills?

aidenn05• 1 month ago

I'll ask him. This was about 20 years ago.

jleyank5• 1 month ago

Worker w/PhD was asked by Quebec during residency interview to produce High School grades. Bureaucrats will be bureaucrats independent of language I guess.

tptacek4• 1 month ago

It's weird that people think AI breaks the concept of work sample testing. Work sample testing isn't "about" programming, and predates the profession of programming. You can (and some companies do) work-sample test sales account managers, customer support, accountants, whatever.

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.

klausa2• 30 days ago

I've seen you comment along those lines before, and I think you're both right, and terribly wrong.

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.

tptacek4• 30 days ago

I agree that there aren't many places that are serious about work-sample testing and far too many that using them as a hiring hazing ritual, but that doesn't make me "terribly wrong", just more distinctively right. We've hired resume-blind at Fly.io for 6 years using work samples with fixed rubrics.

mberning• 1 month ago

Soon people will be taking proctored IQ tests just to be allowed to submit a resume.

aezell• 1 month ago

1600 and your GPA was 4.0. Any other answer proves you aren't trying hard enough to get the job.

apparent22• 30 days ago

4.0, what no APs? Insta-rejected. /s

chasd003• 30 days ago

If I may rant. My oldest son will be a junior in HS next year at a STEM magnet (Townview SEM in Dallas). I think even one of his electives is an AP, It’s kind of ridiculous. APs in HS seem pointless if you can’t apply the credit to your college degree plan. As if a University is going to let a STEM major out of calculus because they took the AP in HS…

teeray• 30 days ago

I couldn’t even tell you my SAT scores. I took it and did reasonably well, but after college it just ceased to be information my brain retained. I don’t even know where my results are, so it’s completely lost information at this point.

HumblyTossed• 30 days ago

Huh, I never took the SATs. What then?

journal• 30 days ago

but that doesn't mean anything

59percentmore• 30 days ago

I wish I could find a position that would. My SAT scores, by far, outshine my CV.

pmontra• 30 days ago

similar-to-me bias (I like you because you're me!).

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.

TomasBM• 30 days ago

Isn't that bias just legitimized by having culture fitness criteria in hiring?

goshx• 30 days ago

Interesting. Xfinity blocked this page as a "security threat." It's likely doing that solely based on the TLD.

cognitiveinline• 30 days ago

Is SAT as good a preditcor as EQ, I wonder, in LLM based work. It seems clearer articulation is more important.

duxup• 30 days ago

Edison also subjected candidates to the 'salt test'. He'd serve candidates soup, and if they salted it before tasting it, he'd allegedly disqualify them. His theory here was that this proved they operated on assumptions.

I really don’t want to eat soup in front of someone I’m interviewing with.

mproud• 30 days ago

I don’t even remember my own GPA, for me college was a lifetime ago!

boring_twenties4• 30 days ago

Since 2023 or so, I've noticed more and more tech companies and hyper-growth startups dropping bachelor's degree requirements.

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.

neogodless• 29 days ago

While it does not come up in interviews, it does seem to come up during resume filtering. (Plenty of jobs I'm otherwise easily qualified for that I didn't get contacted for, even back when basically having a pulse and knowing code could get you any job you wanted.)

cik• 30 days ago

It's always odd to me when filters are applied, that arguably neither influence, nor impact outcomes. From what I can see, SAT scores have effectively changed over time, such that reading comprehension has dropped dramatically, with maths abilities increasing (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/11/for-the-1...).

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.

asimovDev• 30 days ago

Didn't even read the article, first thing I did was go to comments and Ctrl+F "Canonical". Seeing several results light up was really amusing and validating. What a truly awful hiring process

p0w3n3d• 30 days ago

  ``I'm a developer with 20 years of experience. I created systems from scratch.''

  ``And what was your SAT score again?''

morpheuskafka• 30 days ago

YC's application asks for test scores if under 25, although it doesn't specify which ones.

Dilettante_2• 30 days ago

Each applicant took the test under unknown conditions. You don't know [...] whether they walked in cold or worked with a tutor for months, or whether they came from a perfectly stable home life or found out the night before that their dog died/parents are getting divorced/worked the night shift at a grocery store to help pay rent. Maybe they struggled with addiction and rebellion in their youth.

I'm pretty sure this is (part of) what's being filtered for quite intentionally.

socratic_weeb• 30 days ago

Tech companies more and more delusional every time, thinking they are special and that their product is so critical for society, and possibly more complex than operating a particle accelerator. So, you basically have to be an outstanding genius in order to have the "honor" to work for them. Then you go in and it's just a glorified vibecoded spaghetti CRUD. Not surprised.

economistbob• 29 days ago

Age and socioeconomic discrimination. They want only younger people who took the SAT from yuppy societal bastions. Kind of like how Handshake was full of jobs where the firms wanted only recent graduates.

Clearly they will pay a lot of money but be badly run. They want to avoid wokeism beneficiary kids and old folks. An actual job related aptitude test would be better. Half the nation didn't even use the SAT at that age. They used the ACT.

They want young coastal yuppies who were not wokeism beneficiaries at the DEI universities. Those universities broke signaling so making all their alumni show SAT scores instead of relying on the brand will mitigate the fallout.

ACT takers were from lame red states anyway. They want the young blue state brains without the old blue state baggage.

alun• 29 days ago

Aside from the fact that they're judging you based on who you were as a minor, it's interesting how it was a startup that asked for this and not a large corporation, given that modern US public schooling is more optimized towards getting you to work in an large institution than a startup.

Same schedule every single day, you get a lunch break, exams are designed in a way that there's only one single correct answer, outside of the box thinking is wrong, and you'll get at least a B+ if you just do your homework everyday.

mensetmanusman• 29 days ago

Will humans ever replace these tests with discussions with a super intelligence that creates a hypergraph projection of our understanding?

Job application asked for my SAT scores

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