Hold on…did you mean to say a lower GPA or test score? Seems to me that a 3.8 and 1500+ SAT is not a smart slacker (or any kind of slacker)…I just want to make sure I’m following your point.
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Only on CC is a 3.8 student considered a slacker 
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I cringe when I hear someone calling Goldman elite. It’s a big place. Investment banking at GS, or Operations? IT or Trading? Not long ago my spouse interviewed a stellar young man - Engineering from Purdue, Finance Masters from Stevens. This young guy had an offer from Goldman, and one from spouse’s company - a mid tier bank - which he eventually took. Found out later that the GS offer was far lower in comp than the mid tier bank. If evaluating a job based on which pays the most, than the GS/BlackRock/ PE cache is important if you make your money off the franchise value, i.e Investment Banking. For any non-PnL jobs you’ll work twice as hard and might even get paid less.
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No. SAT is an achievement test (what one has learned), not an aptitude test.
Do you have a source for this? Not challenging you, but I haven’t necessarily known that to be the case…any data would be helpful.
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30 years of hiring and I’ve never once asked anyone for their GPA. It’s a lazy way to interview and bodes poorly to the priorities of a company tbh. GPA is a scholastic game that doesn’t translate well into the private sector. You’re going to have a hard time in industry if you needed a 504 to give you extra time on all your tests, or you needed that A so badly that you cheated in college (we know it happens). If GPA is paramount, then stay in school forever, and spare the private sector your feelings about micro-aggressions and fairness.
Once upon a time, with a different version of the test, the creators of the SAT claimed that it was a measure of “IQ”, whatever that actually means. However, even the College Board is saying that the present day SAT test is not a measure of IQ, but of mastery of the material that students learned.
Moreover, my kid raised her PSAT scores by 180 points over PSAT 9, PSAT 10, and PSAT?NMSQT, and then added another 70 points to her SAT scores. I find it very difficult to believe that my kid’s IQ jumped 250 points in two years. She did not take any SAT courses either, but taking the PSATs gave her experience in taking these sorts of tests, and she covered stuff in class that was on these tests.
I also am interested in that. It does make a lot of sense, but I would be interested if this has been studied.
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No particular source, but I saw it in successful tech companies several times. One of the companies that did this was EMC (a computer storage company that is now part of Dell), and I see there actually was an article written about this back in 1998:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB899782097935431000
And here’s a snippet from the article:
Over the years, EMC has preferred to hire representatives right out of college, often athletes from blue-collar backgrounds. It figures that that background translates into a strong work ethic, and that athletes compete harder in the sales field. EMC’s cadre of young hustlers enables it to “kick the hell out of the competition,” Mr. Egan says. Although the company now hires many midcareer reps, it continues to look for “that angry young person” with a “maniacal kind of approach,” says Robert M. Dutkowsky, head of sales.
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I recognize this is an unpopular position, but there is data to back it up. For anyone interested, there is a really fascinating book called “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” by Kathryn Paige Harden. She specifically addresses the correlation between IQ tests and SAT/ACT and there is indeed a strong correlation according the research she cites.
From her book: “The skills measured by IQ tests, while certainly only representing a fraction of possible human skills and talents, cannot be wished away as unimportant. Scores on standardized cognitive tests (including scores on the classic IQ tests and also scores on tests used for educational selection, like the SAT and ACT, which are also highly correlated with IQ test scores) statistically predict things that we care about…Students with higher SAT scores, which are correlated as highly as .8 with IQ [with 1.0 being a 100% positive correlation] earn higher grades in college…” [pp. 220-221]. She footnotes her research in the book and cites the specific studies.
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Apparently only in the Armed Forces is it still politically correct to refer to “aptitude tests”. But the military is happy to produce a concordance table to convert ASVAB scores to SAT scores and vice versa. And the ASVAB composite is much more highly correlated with SAT scores than either test is with HSGPA. The military use it to identify promising recruits who underperformed their potential in high school.
https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&context=edd
“
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It really depends upon the job, the industry, and the number of applications. No company can interview a million applicants, but some get that number
Richard Haier also has many papers on SAT correlations with general intelligence. He also says it hard to discuss because people don’t really like that.
Lex Fridman has a great podcast with him - very interesting.
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Sad. Clearly the military stating the SAT is an aptitude test does not make it so.
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To muddle the waters…wonder how accomodations affect the SAT/IQ paradigm.
I know several normal students (many with teacher/therapist parents) that got their kids accomodations so they could have more time on all school work and on the SAT. I am not talking about kids with legitimate disabilities btw.
Or how about kids that spend months prepping with a private tutor in order to do well - I’m uncertain that indicates a high IQ ?
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The same Richard Haier that brought pseudo-scientists onto the editorial board at Intelligence, despite their minuscule (or non-existent) qualifications? Neat.
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Good point. The proportion of students getting testing accommodations seems to have grown a lot over the last decade or so (I don’t have data). The affluent have much higher rates of accommodations too…not necessarily because they have higher rates of disabilities/conditions that qualify for accommodations, but because they have better access to health care professionals. I am sure there is some abuse in getting accommodations too. My kids’ HS (affluent large college-going) had about 20% of students getting accommodations on ACT/SAT in the recent past.
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Article discussing Haier and his friends . . .
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Let us take a moment to remember that the SATs were created to keep minorities, which at that point included Southern and Eastern Europeans, Irish, and Jews, out of colleges.
Carl Brigham, who created the first SATs was certain that few, if any, of the minorities who applied to colleges would do well on his tests, and therefore would not be accepted to colleges. He created tests with questions which were very much embedded in the life experiences of the wealthy White Protestant ruling class of the time. It was also based on the education that these people were receiving.
Unsurprisingly, people who were not Wealthy White Protestants attending Elite private prep schools did not do that well on these tests.
I’m sorry, but if holistic admissions are wrong because they are tainted by their use to exclude minorities from colleges, the SATs should just as wrong, since they are tainted in a far worse manner.
[ aside]
The concept of “IQ”, comes from the exact same origin as the SATs. It was developed from the Yerkes tests, which were created to test the EDUCATION levels of Army recruits. Like the SATs, the same tests were used, with minimal modifications, to test “IQ”, which the developers of these tests claimed was the “innate intelligence” of the person who took the tests.
The results of the use of those tests, especially on immigrants, was horrifying. Among other things, they were used to justify slashing Jewish immigration to the USA to a trickle, just as Hitler came to power. Those quotas were in place during and after the Holocaust.
The people who were responsible for trapping hundreds of thousand of Jews inside the death trap of Europe were using the exact same arguments that the proponents of the use of IQ tests today are using. The claimed that it was scientific, rigorous, and unbiased.
The children of the same Jews who scored as “imbeciles” on Ellis Island IQ tests went on to win Nobel prizes.
[ /aside]
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This whole thread on the war on the SAT reminds me of the cynical but truthful quote from Nobel-winning economist Ronald H. Coase: if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. To which I would add, also cynically: if you think hard enough, you will find ways to dismiss any data that produce conclusions you don’t like. Such is social science, I guess.
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