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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

These arguments all sound familiar to the "high stakes testing" debate about the SATs. The tests were unfair, did not measure college readiness, could be gamed, etc.

Then universities dropped the SAT requirements. Even MIT was suckered into dropping them. It was a disaster. It turns out the SATs were a very strong predictor of college success. MIT and others reinstated the SATs.

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Ways SAT is more reasonable than typical leetcode interview:

  - you can take it ~3 times and most colleges will give you the best score without penalty
  - you can use your result to apply as many times as you want
  - if you feel stuck you can still get a good score by moving on to the other problems
  - it's administered uniformly across the world
  - you don't need to narrate your thinking while you're still processing information
  - you get an objective score instead of a pass/fail that may be subjective

All true, but still the arguments presented here sound the same as the arguments against SATs and "high stakes testing". I checked a bunch of major software companies, and all of them used leetcode as a screening device. (Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, Anthropic)

Cargo cult nonsense.

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