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It's not just an IQ test, it's a test of ability, which is different. Your college record shows that you a) Whether you were able to get the work done. b) Whet

It's not just an IQ test, it's a test of ability, which is different. Your college record shows that you a) Whether you were able to get the work done. b) Whether you were smart enough to do the work well. It's the combination that's important, not either single one. Employers want people who show up on time, actually care enough to try, and are smart enough to figure it out. The college degree has a better than zero correlation to that. After you get the job it's mainly about performance and output, once you've been promoted a few times your college degree mostly doesn't matter.

rogerbinns 9y ago
It also shows that you could do that for several years, following the rules set by someone else, and passing.
- bittercynic 9y ago
  Nice double meaning with 'passing' also meaning something like: "able to appear to be what those in power want me to be."
  - mwfunk 9y ago
    I would not interpret it that way at all. Being able to understand requirements and implement stuff based on those requirements, or work as part of a team, or maintain dedication to a task for weeks or months at a time, has nothing to do with teenage notions of the world being populated by conformists vs. nonconformists (which ironically is usually based on very conformist notions of what it means to be a nonconformist). On the other hand, I have known a number of people who used their self-identification as a nonconformist as an excuse for why they couldn't cut it someplace, whether it's school or a job or some interpersonal situation. It's a bad excuse because it gives the person an easy out for not reflecting on how they could have handled the situation better, or avoided getting into the situation in the first place. It also pushes all of the blame on other people, which is comforting but very rarely 100% true. We should all be our own worst critics, lest someone else beats us to it.
toasterlovin 9y ago
I agree with all of that, though spending 4 years to make that determination seems crazy to me. A competent employer can figure out which hires are worthwhile in about a month or so. There’s another issue with using educational attainment as a proxy of intelligence: it doesn’t really help you distinguish among candidates who all have a bachelors degree. All you know is that they’re above some threshold, but not how far above. You can use the prestige of the school as a proxy for this, but it all seems like a hell of a lot of hassle when you can figure this all out in a half hour with an IQ test.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  IQ test tell you how good someone is at pattern recognition, which is a major factor in abilo to learn. It doesn't tell you what they have learned, or if they have the criticality important skill of perseverance/grit. In fact, high IQ can reduce grit, since clever pattern matchers use their cleverness to avoid working hard on the toy problems of childhood.
  - johnnyhillbilly 9y ago
    My personal take on this is that high IQ quickly turns into a liability in childhood. Particularly when entering the school system. I believe the words "bored to tears" summarize the experience quite well. While the majority of pupils get a standardized curriculum designed to keep their interest at a steady pace, pupils with a high learning capacity get no such thing. If they try to learn faster, it doesn't fit with the governance and management model within which the teacher must operate. Therefore, most teachers are at a loss when faced with these statistical outliers. Also, other pupils may experience emotions of inadequacy and unfairness when a fellow pupil just blasts through the material in minutes that would take them all week. This may lead to the high capacity pupil being a target of some unfortunate group dynamics. Since schools have no governance model for this, the high learning capacity pupil's school experience is essentially unmanaged. At a loss, society almost invariably resorts to platitudes like "No need to feel sorry for them, because they are so fortunate to be smart. We must focus on the pupils that struggle." A few years down the line, the pupil's inner motivation may be completely replaced by depression, self-blaming or worse. Then the platitudes take a turn for the worse with blaming the pupil's willingness to work: "In fact, high IQ can reduce grit, since clever pattern matchers use their cleverness to avoid working hard on the toy problems of childhood." Fortunately, my own school days are long since gone. Without blaming any person in the system, I can say: "Good riddance!" to this whole pitiful affair of how society treated me as a child. Instead, I can draw attention to this problem by saying clearly that these are children that never asked for these gifts in the first place. Let's as a society realize that what we are doing to them is absolutely wrong and woefully irresponsible. Fortunately, at least one western country has political attention on this right now. I will work hard and with "grit" to make sure that my experience and observations can help in creating new policies. In particular I wish to address how to practically leverage the pupils' own drive to learn without incurring social/peer stigma or ridiculous costs.

rogerbinns 9y ago

It also shows that you could do that for several years, following the rules set by someone else, and passing.

bittercynic 9y ago
Nice double meaning with 'passing' also meaning something like: "able to appear to be what those in power want me to be."
- mwfunk 9y ago
  I would not interpret it that way at all. Being able to understand requirements and implement stuff based on those requirements, or work as part of a team, or maintain dedication to a task for weeks or months at a time, has nothing to do with teenage notions of the world being populated by conformists vs. nonconformists (which ironically is usually based on very conformist notions of what it means to be a nonconformist). On the other hand, I have known a number of people who used their self-identification as a nonconformist as an excuse for why they couldn't cut it someplace, whether it's school or a job or some interpersonal situation. It's a bad excuse because it gives the person an easy out for not reflecting on how they could have handled the situation better, or avoided getting into the situation in the first place. It also pushes all of the blame on other people, which is comforting but very rarely 100% true. We should all be our own worst critics, lest someone else beats us to it.

toasterlovin 9y ago

I agree with all of that, though spending 4 years to make that determination seems crazy to me. A competent employer can figure out which hires are worthwhile in about a month or so. There’s another issue with using educational attainment as a proxy of intelligence: it doesn’t really help you distinguish among candidates who all have a bachelors degree. All you know is that they’re above some threshold, but not how far above. You can use the prestige of the school as a proxy for this, but it all seems like a hell of a lot of hassle when you can figure this all out in a half hour with an IQ test.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
IQ test tell you how good someone is at pattern recognition, which is a major factor in abilo to learn. It doesn't tell you what they have learned, or if they have the criticality important skill of perseverance/grit. In fact, high IQ can reduce grit, since clever pattern matchers use their cleverness to avoid working hard on the toy problems of childhood.
- johnnyhillbilly 9y ago
  My personal take on this is that high IQ quickly turns into a liability in childhood. Particularly when entering the school system. I believe the words "bored to tears" summarize the experience quite well. While the majority of pupils get a standardized curriculum designed to keep their interest at a steady pace, pupils with a high learning capacity get no such thing. If they try to learn faster, it doesn't fit with the governance and management model within which the teacher must operate. Therefore, most teachers are at a loss when faced with these statistical outliers. Also, other pupils may experience emotions of inadequacy and unfairness when a fellow pupil just blasts through the material in minutes that would take them all week. This may lead to the high capacity pupil being a target of some unfortunate group dynamics. Since schools have no governance model for this, the high learning capacity pupil's school experience is essentially unmanaged. At a loss, society almost invariably resorts to platitudes like "No need to feel sorry for them, because they are so fortunate to be smart. We must focus on the pupils that struggle." A few years down the line, the pupil's inner motivation may be completely replaced by depression, self-blaming or worse. Then the platitudes take a turn for the worse with blaming the pupil's willingness to work: "In fact, high IQ can reduce grit, since clever pattern matchers use their cleverness to avoid working hard on the toy problems of childhood." Fortunately, my own school days are long since gone. Without blaming any person in the system, I can say: "Good riddance!" to this whole pitiful affair of how society treated me as a child. Instead, I can draw attention to this problem by saying clearly that these are children that never asked for these gifts in the first place. Let's as a society realize that what we are doing to them is absolutely wrong and woefully irresponsible. Fortunately, at least one western country has political attention on this right now. I will work hard and with "grit" to make sure that my experience and observations can help in creating new policies. In particular I wish to address how to practically leverage the pupils' own drive to learn without incurring social/peer stigma or ridiculous costs.