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Comment by EgregiousCube | Hacker News Reader

"You're partly making your decision based on who someone was as a 17 year old."

Sure, but IQ tests show a high degree of stability over a person's life. It's not unreasonable to be interested in it for sorting.

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SAT isn’t an IQ test, and probably all sorts of people took it before they had cultural awareness or a diagnosis that would have lead to different testing conditions had it been taken after diagnosis, let alone the fact that test scores are not comparable.

GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.

While edge cases may exist, for the most part, a test score / GPA / anything where the numerator is almost as big as the denominator is a good signal.

SAT isn't an IQ test but IQ is very correlated with SAT scores.

SAT isn't a perfect IQ test but it's not bad for a first-pass filter. Nearly all who scored 1600 will be bright and nearly all who score 800 won't be.

It's a bit like BMI. Yes, if you're Peter Dinklage or Arnold Schwarzenegger it will be pretty meaningless. But most people aren't and BMI works pretty well for them.

Can you say the same for SAT tests, where the score is best of N and N is however many the person can afford and varies between candidates?

Yes; though SAT is less prep-resistant and it'd be smart to apply a "+/- 100pts" fuzz to a score.

And the meaning of the score changes over the years based on the test itself changing. Same goes for the company's GPA requirements where there have clearly been shifts across schools on the amount of grade inflation allowed or even encouraged.

As an aside, I'm not sure if I or the College Board can prove my score at this point.

Not only that, but the SAT is not an IQ test and you can definitely study for it. Students with wealthy or motivated parents can get study books or tutors which makes a huge difference in score.

The Princeton Review promises a 200 point score improvement with some of their packages. And they can fairly-reliably achieve it too.

And I guarantee you that claim is based on an intentionally flawed experiment where they take students who have never seen the test before vs after completing the program. The actual control should be against students who have taken a couple of cheaply available practice tests.

You can study for most IQ tests as well.

I never done an iq test, but just curious, can’t one simply “rehearse/study” for such tests? I dunno, let’s say you do a few past IQ tests (with answers available), I guess one could get a higher score just by doing that

You can. IQ scores are not stable throughout one’s life.

I dislike this argument. I think in some dimensions these types of tests can work, but I’ve never been the type of person who’s been able to score well, and I don’t test particularly well in general, yet I did my PhD work at <IVY LEAGUE> and have had a great career despite this. I think that testing is good for people who can be adequately evaluated, but for people like me it just leads to a lifetime of feeling like something’s wrong with you.

Test-taking may only roughly correlate to intelligence, and is just one dimension of a human... but they likely care less about false negatives (like you) than they do about false positives in alternative assessments.

I can't speak for others here and we don't have SATs in this country, but these things can be very unfair. When I was seventeen, I had a lot of things to deal with which were not of my own making, such as caring for a terminally ill relative and wondering if I would even have a roof over my head a few months down the line. That kind of thing tends to take your mind off school work. Several years later and I was in a much better place.

I think it's fair enough to say teenagers in general have more instability in their life even without this.

If you think it matters (I don’t) and think you scored unfairly low at 17, you can take (or retake) the SAT at any age.

We don't have SATs in this country (like I said). Yes, we can retake the equivalent here, but retaken exams are valued less by both employers and universities.

I spent much of that period visiting hospices and hospitals, and eventually ending up homeless for a while as a result of all this. I was more interested in being able to support myself financially for the next few years, and recovering psychologically.

My qualifications after this consisted of diplomas and degrees.

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