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...
Job application asked for my SAT scores
51–60 of 403 posts
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#52Company is Alpha Vantage: https://beaverhand.com/apply/alpha-vantage-gtm-team-various-...
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.
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#53"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.
SAT isn’t an IQ test, and probably all sorts of people took it before they had cultural awareness or a diagnosis that would have lead to different testing conditions had it been taken after diagnosis, let alone the fact that test scores are not comparable. GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.
SAT isn't a perfect IQ test but it's not bad for a first-pass filter. Nearly all who scored 1600 will be bright and nearly all who score 800 won't be.
It's a bit like BMI. Yes, if you're Peter Dinklage or Arnold Schwarzenegger it will be pretty meaningless. But most people aren't and BMI works pretty well for them.
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#54You 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, an…
You can look at historical percentile by year and score though.
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#55Canonical? Heard nothing but bad things about their hiring process.
wild to call out a random org like that…
Look at any of their job applications, they're all like this:
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In cursive" is just filtering for people old enough to have been taught cursive.
sadly my kids were just recently taught cursive in elementary school for some unknown reason
Learning it is mostly useful for being capable of reading it, esp. when encountering historical documents (or when encountering old people)
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#57As 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…
> [...] 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.
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#58Company is Alpha Vantage: https://beaverhand.com/apply/alpha-vantage-gtm-team-various-...
> 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 s…
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.
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#59"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.
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…
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.
Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores
#60> 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.