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Comment by emondi | Hacker News Reader

You can still learn a lot even if you don't graduate.

Sure, but the possession of a real university degree pretty much guarantees you can at least read, write & reason. Most Americans without a University degree can read, write & reason, of course, often better than a University grad, but the University degree proves you can do it at least minimally. It used to be that a grade 8 certificate would provide that guarantee, then it used to be that a grade 12 certificate would do it too.

There are far cheaper ways of proving somebody can read, write & reason but for some reason employers seem to be stuck on that University diploma. I guess it's easy for them.

At the company where I work there is a written test of language/logic/math that applicants for jobs have to take. This has had the effect that almost nobody at this company is stupid or incompetent. They are also easy to work with - I would guess partly because social ability is correlated to intelligence.

I suspect this test is the single biggest reason for the success of the company.

Is this something your company came up with itself? Is it available publicly?

I think the test was provided by some company. There was nothing magical about it though - part of it looked mostly like an IQ test, and there were math questions and short reading comprehension tasks. It was fairly easy and the biggest difficulty I thought was the short amount of time we had to complete it.

I suspect any reasonable test in that general direction would do the job. I don't think they use it to specifically hire the people who achieve the very best scores, but rather to not hire the ones who perform poorly.

They are usually called "Psychotechnical tests", and their use is standard in many industries. Though judging for some people I've seen passing them, I'd say that most of them are borderline useless, or not really used.

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