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If I were to send you my resume (sans test scores), do you think you could guess whether I got a 1570 or a 1600? Or is it something you can only tell from pers

by endtime 16y ago

If I were to send you my resume (sans test scores), do you think you could guess whether I got a 1570 or a 1600? Or is it something you can only tell from personal interaction?

nostrademons 16y ago
It's from working on a project with someone or sharing a class with them. If you have a casual conversation or quickly glance at a resume, it's quite easy to miscategorize. But if you're working with someone day-in-and-day out for 3 months or so, you figure out pretty quickly who knows their stuff and who's just pretending. I suppose it's possible that someone could know their stuff and yet have bombed the SAT (if, say, they went to a rock concert the night before), or they could've aced the SAT and through sheer lazyness prove to be utterly useless. But the skills that make you do well on the SAT - quick reasoning, good short-term memory, a decent-sized store of background knowledge, and an eye toward detail that makes you go back and double-check your answers - tend to make them perform very well at a project as well. That's why people use the SAT: it may not be intelligence, but it correlates very well with it.
- endtime 16y ago
  So someone who only got a 1570 is "just pretending"?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Speaking as someone who got higher than that and still feels like I'm "just pretending" on a regular basis, yes.
    - endtime 16y ago
      Are you serious? If you did that well on the SAT, surely you see the fallacy implicit in your comment. But just in case, I'll spell it out - I can't imagine any justification for the assumption that the ordering of people by the degree to which they "know their stuff" is the same as the ordering of them by SAT score. I'm sure there's a correlation, but what you said requires something far stronger. You may not have meant it in such a precise sense, but even in that case I think my objection actually still applies.

by endtime 16y ago

If I were to send you my resume (sans test scores), do you think you could guess whether I got a 1570 or a 1600? Or is it something you can only tell from personal interaction?

nostrademons 16y ago

It's from working on a project with someone or sharing a class with them. If you have a casual conversation or quickly glance at a resume, it's quite easy to miscategorize. But if you're working with someone day-in-and-day out for 3 months or so, you figure out pretty quickly who knows their stuff and who's just pretending. I suppose it's possible that someone could know their stuff and yet have bombed the SAT (if, say, they went to a rock concert the night before), or they could've aced the SAT and through sheer lazyness prove to be utterly useless. But the skills that make you do well on the SAT - quick reasoning, good short-term memory, a decent-sized store of background knowledge, and an eye toward detail that makes you go back and double-check your answers - tend to make them perform very well at a project as well. That's why people use the SAT: it may not be intelligence, but it correlates very well with it.

endtime 16y ago
So someone who only got a 1570 is "just pretending"?
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Speaking as someone who got higher than that and still feels like I'm "just pretending" on a regular basis, yes.
  - endtime 16y ago
    Are you serious? If you did that well on the SAT, surely you see the fallacy implicit in your comment. But just in case, I'll spell it out - I can't imagine any justification for the assumption that the ordering of people by the degree to which they "know their stuff" is the same as the ordering of them by SAT score. I'm sure there's a correlation, but what you said requires something far stronger. You may not have meant it in such a precise sense, but even in that case I think my objection actually still applies.