Job application asked for my SAT scores – Mr. Market

Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote j...">

Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote j...">

Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote j...">

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Job application asked for my SAT scores

20 Jun, 2026

Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote job, I'm looking for hybrid). I found one that advertised an opening they called "GTM". I thought that was cool re: no specific scope, just someone who could make their product attractive to buyers however they can.

Product seemed good (ETL type of tool). Everything was about what I expected, until this blurb at the end:

If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to our anonymized careers inbox with your resume. Please include your undergrad GPA and your SAT scores (other standardized tests such as GRE, GMAT, etc. are acceptable in lieu of SAT scores) even if you are several years or even decades removed from undergrad. We do not have any cut-offs for either metric, but note that failure to provide these will disqualify your application from further consideration.

I found this interesting for two reasons:

Since 2023 or so, I've noticed more and more tech companies and hyper-growth startups dropping bachelor's degree requirements. Instead, many ask about side projects/links to personal websites/blurbs about what you're most proud of. Basically, indicators that someone is passionate and a 'self-starter.'

Why would you ask for a self-reported, unverifiable test score that could be decades old at this point? There must be a better predictor for current cognitive ability than that, if that's what you're testing for. If not, this seems like a trick question to test compliance with pointless directives.

Under ideal conditions, SAT scores are probably a decent proxy for predicting whether a new hire will contribute to the success of your business. Cognitive ability is, unsurprisingly, positively correlated with professional success.

That said, there are clear problems with using an old SAT score as a decades-old litmus test for intelligence:

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

Each applicant took the test under unknown conditions. You don't know if this was their first attempt or their fifth, whether they walked in cold or worked with a tutor for months, or whether they came from a perfectly stable home life or found out the night before that their dog died/parents are getting divorced/worked the night shift at a grocery store to help pay rent. Maybe they struggled with addiction and rebellion in their youth. There are probably many reasons why two candidates, equally cognitively capable, got different scores, or that a test taken a decade ago wouldn't reflect a candidate's current ability.

Regardless of whether they were testing compliance or cognitive ability, this unusual request led me down a rabbit hole of hiring practices. Both the gold-standard, time-tested methods and the bizarre, almost mystical attempts to see the future or know someone else's soul.

A very very brief history of hiring assessments

Historians credit the military with establishing the 'science' of the modern hiring assessment.

In 1917, staring down the fraught pitch of WWI, the army had to sort 1.5 million recruits quickly into the units for which they were best suited. Due to the time crunch, traditional interviews weren't gonna cut it.

Robert Yerkes and his committee developed the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests as a solve, the former for literate recruits and the latter for illiterate recruits or those who didn't speak English. They were basically the same, just Army Beta was nonverbal to circumvent communication barriers. These formed the basis of group-administered cognitive tests.

The other founding lineage is the assessment center, originally used for spy selection. Personality theorist Henry Murray ran a three day program at a bucolic estate tucked away in the country with simulations and multiple assessors. In the mid 1950s, AT&T launched a longitudinal study to see whether these assessment center ratings held water and found they worked decently well as a predictor for success.

The methods that appear to work best most often

No hiring method is perfect, of course, but we do have evidence that a mixture of a couple methods work best in predicting future professional success.

As of 1998, the cognitive test (of which SAT is one) was considered the best predictor. Then, in 2022, Sackett et al. argued convincingly that...