One US university used to (may still) have a program where they would take relatively non-technical people off the street, and if they could pass an aptitude te

One US university used to (may still) have a program where they would take relatively non-technical people off the street, and if they could pass an aptitude test would consider them (interview) for a programmer training course. This test was notorious for the failure rate, but the program consistently produced coders who quickly became able to maintain the university's systems. (Trainees were taught a procedural language for a mainframe, but in the early 2000s they were gradually migrating to web and Java.) This test, supposedly developed by IBM in the 1960s, had nothing about programming. It was all pattern recognition - look at a series of geometric figures and predict the next, and some variations on this concept. I was skeptical of the suitability of this test, but the U. was convinced by the apparent results.