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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

The SAT is good for measuring how good one is at taking the SAT, which in turn is an indicator of how much the test taker took preparing for the exam seriously, which is an indirect indicator of the person's work ethic and attitude towards putting in effort for a means to an end (yes, despite the pointlessness of this exam). It does do a decent job at finding such people who strive to excel within the limits of a (flawed) system, whether or not they realize the pointlessness of said structure. If an institution is looking for an indicator for such people, the SAT is an acceptable tool.

Of course, what it's truly good for is to measure how affluent the student's family is.

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In particular from the post:

>"The purpose of the SAT is to predict how well a high school student would perform as a freshman at a college or university in the United States of America (USA)."

>"...Another implication of the purpose of the SAT is that taking preparation courses that focus on the exact, narrow content of the SAT, no more and no less, is not "morally wrong". If a person does better on the SAT as a result of specific training or coaching, then, in essence, the SAT has indicated that the person has a quality (such as initiative, motivation, or money) that correlates with good performance in a college or university in the United States of America (USA)."

While I'm a different person at the age of 30 (Just finished my A.S. two days ago with a 3.7 GPA), I have to admit that I was extremely lazy as a teenager. As a matter of fact, I was almost certainly the laziest person in my class. Keeping that in mind, I achieved the second highest score on the PSAT in my school. I don't think that a standardized test as easy as the SATs is a good indicator of work ethic.

In my opinion, the completion of a college degree in combination with one's GPA add up to a pretty good, but not perfect, indicator of one's work ethic. Standardized tests on the other hand, could identify intelligence, but probably not in their current forms.

Well said. Except I'd make the following corrections:

  s/[(]yes.*exam.//;
  s/.flawed.//;
  $d

I'd add that sometimes the "end" may be pointless, though you might not see it as such while working toward it; years later, in hindsight you might realise it was the "means", i.e., the process of working toward it, i.e. the "hard work", that was the point.

Interestingly, there's no "hard work" in taking a test you do not prepare for, e.g., an IQ test.

Everyone I know with a high IQ did plenty of IQ test practice.

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