Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Should employers be asking job applicants for SAT scores?

Today's WSJ discusses how employers are asking job applicants to submit their SAT scores.  The SAT is designed to predict academic performance in the first year of college.  So how could such scores inform hiring decisions, especially for experienced employees who took the test decades ago?

Not many employees spend their time calculating the area of a triangle or doing sentence completion exercises (unless their job is to write SAT questions for the College Board). Managers might logically use the SAT if they thought it predicted job performance, but a well run company would do a validation study to make sure this is an evidence-based decision.  Google used to use GPAs and the SAT but stopped the practice two years ago because they were poor predictors.


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