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Comment by beatgammit | Hacker News Reader

I admit, I didn't read the whole thing, it was super long.

I personally think the ACT (and by association the SAT) is a better measure of intelligence than a GPA, and I would love it if companies used that more often as a filtering metric. Obviously, grades in general aren't the best metric, but they're simple and generally pretty reliable.

If I were hiring somebody, I'd look at a combination of test scores and personal achievements. If I were hiring a programmer, I'd filter by test scores, then look at examples of projects the applicant works on/is associated with. Grades aren't as important in my opinion.

If that's the premise of the post, I totally agree. If not, I'm not willing to read a forever long post that forces me to relive the horror of the testing I went through before I got into college.

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You're looking for the canned tokenadult post which summarizes as follows:

[paraphrased] "Decades of research have established that the most effective indicators of whether someone will be a good hire are (on the one hand) a general intelligence test, and (on the other hand) a work sample. Outside the US, the use of intelligence tests in hiring is common; within the US, it subjects the hiring agent to legal difficulties. If you are hiring outside the US, use both. If you are hiring inside the US, use work samples."

Actually, the effective hiring procedures of either kind are rare everywhere, but, yes, that is otherwise a fair summary of my FAQ post on company hiring procedures,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

which I too thought seems to fit in with several of the comments in this thread. Regrettably, most companies miss out on opportunities to use the best available hiring procedures, preferring the traditional methods to methods validated by research.

> the ACT (and by association the SAT)

As someone who nearly aced both, the ACT is a noticeably better test. The SAT has a lot of dumb and predictable tricks involved. The ACT requires more actual ability.

Anything involving a test will simply measure one's skill at taking tests instead of what the test is actually about. If this wasn't true at some point in the past, it's certainly true now.

Furthermore, seeing as you didn't read the whole thing, you would have missed the part where the SAT itself explicitly states that it is intended not to measure intellect, but rather how well one would perform at a university.

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