Job application asked for my SAT scores

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

> not in the sense of being good at taking tests

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

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...

In the US or China?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You basically described Canonical's hiring process !

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Got a source for that, bud?

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.

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

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.

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?

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 :)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Seriously? This made me lol.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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

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