Job application asked for my SAT scores

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.

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.

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.