Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Job application asked for my SAT scores

mrmarket.lol

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 403 posts

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#371

Post by alun »

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.

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#372

Post by tavavex »

alephnerd wrote: post #112
annzabelle wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really state my whole view, but hard exams like Oxford and Cambridge use make sense for elite colleges to use (rather than unrelated extracurriculars), but reforming the whole education system to be oriented around a single high stakes test like in China or Korea has its own severe costs. I do not want high schoolers to spend 20 hours a week at hagwons, and the current resume filler system is also terrible.…

> We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels They are already being used like that in college admissions today. > possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission Already in use explicitly at most of the top CS programs today > I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 2…

> The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation.

The difficult pill that society refuses to swallow is that most of the simple innovations that are feasible under our constraints have already been innovated. There are no more individual 'inventors'. The source of modern technological innovation are lucky discoveries that manage to scrape from the bottom of the easy-to-find barrel, genuine one in a million genuises and (mostly) the hard work of large groups over many years. Even the brightest top 0.1% of people mostly won't be coming up with ideas that a thousand people before them didn't already have.

Yet people will not settle for this. Instead of acknowledging it, we'd rather apply the good old human model of 'if 1x of something is good, then we need 1000000x of that' and take healthy competition to transform it into a ruthless race to the bottom.

Past a certain point of competition, you stop selecting for the metric you care about (academic performance, curiosity, creativity) and start selecting for people who are willing to slave away sunrise-to-sunset to work on tasks they know are almost meaningless but that contribute to your selection criteria. The metric becomes the only goal. You're also indirectly selecting for wealth, because rich parents can afford to spend lots of time with their child, not make the child work, pay for all their extracurriculars and tutoring.

The diminishing returns are immense, and we can already see that in countries that never fought this race to the bottom. Their students are more miserable than ever, and for what? Frankly, forcing children to waste away their best days to make them clear arbitrarily rising barriers that we know are meaningless is unthinkably heartless.

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#373

Post by Maxatar »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #366
Maxatar wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The submission isn't about academic tests involving academics... it's about the relevance of using such academic tests for the purpose of job screening.

A business that wastes money on ineffective screening methods for employees will lose to a business hiring better employees.

Which is why almost no employers ask for SAT scores as a way of screening candidates, and why this article was written to showcase the specific reasons doing so is ineffective.

Of course you'd have refrained from making such a vacuous reply if you bothered to read the article.

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#374

Post by SoftTalker »

naishoya wrote: post #281
SoftTalker wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the actual premed or engineering coursework at Harvard or Princeton really that much more rigorous than that at a flagship state school? I'm doubtful.

Quick answer: YES 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 publi…

> 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'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.

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#375

Post by commandlinefan »

hammock wrote: post #188
WalterBright wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The SAT is actually a lot easier today than it was when most of us took it. 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 never took the SAT, but I did take the GRE. The year I took it, it was 3 sections: Quantitative, Verbal and Writing. The year I took it, the writing section replaced an older Logic section. Quantitative and verbal were scored out of 800 points (like the SAT), but the writing section was scored 0-6 in half-point increments. I think the writing section has also since 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.

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#376

Post by onetimeusename »

Pay08 wrote: post #293
onetimeusename wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Have university faculty become mostly Asian too?

I don't know. I won't even comment on this because I have no insight besides personal observation.

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#377

Post by apparent »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #338
apparent wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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 af…

> 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

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).

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#378

Post by somenameforme »

marcuskane2 wrote: post #354
somenameforme wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody who goes to take a test on something they know that they know nothing about could be called many things, but genius is not one, even moreso when they're paying for the privilege of taking that test. What is on the SAT is no secret, so people are free to prepare as little or as much as they might like. If somebody can't be assed to prepare for such a critical test, then they're probably going to be the sort o…

Or they're a student who has to work a part-time job after school. Or they have a long commute. Or they have hours of practice for a competitive sport or extracurricular. Or they have to take care of their siblings, grandparent or sick parent. Or they were told by their parents and teachers that because they're smart and do well in school that they don't need to worry about studying. Or they know their parents can't…

We're talking about the SAT, not the gaokao [1]. It's a relatively short test that you can take it whenever you want, you can even retake it if you want, however many times you want. There's minimal memorization required and it's mostly testing basic aptitude. But the overwhelming majority of people are of average aptitude, so the overwhelming majority of people will do "poorly" on the SAT when comparing themselves to outliers.

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#379

Post by mangodrunk »

FatherOfCurses wrote: post #364
WalterBright wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"?

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 closel…

That still doesn’t seem like a reasonable reason to not do tests. In the software analogy you have a unit test that passes but the actual software fails when used in the real world.

What is the point of “knowledge” that can’t be demonstrated. How will that person demonstrate their knowledge of Shakespeare?

Re: Job application asked for my SAT scores

#380

Post by Morromist »

apparent wrote: post #334
Morromist wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fact…

There are fee waivers for poor kids, and free test prep thanks to Khan Academy. These may not have existed decades ago, but they exist now.

Fee waivers are great. A lot of poor parents are too busy / don't have their shit together enough to learn about them & use them. A lot of poor parents won't even have their kids take the tests at all even if they are free, especially if it means taking an entire day to drive them to the test facility. They might not even know what an SAT test is.
Post reply on HN