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How much does a support advisor make at shopify?
Folks, I am in the final stages of converting an offer for the position of Senior Advisor, Business Intelligence at Dell Technologies
If this gets converted what should be a good salary range to negotiate with the HR?
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Chief
The best predictor for SAT score is household income. It’s not a good test and shouldn’t be used as a gatekeeper.
D1, this is false. There are other drivers far more correlated with SAT scores.
I mean I don’t know anyone dumb who got a top tier score and I don’t know anyone brilliant who got less than stellar scores.
It’s the best level playing field for everyone to compete on. If you move away from it, how will a first gen kid from rural area stand out to admissions? All the other soft-criteria are even more easily manipulated by those with resources.
Does it miss some folks who are talented? Sure. Fo we have something better? No.
Also fair point above, it might not be a better measure of probability of academic success….
I’ve always thought that people who say say they “aren’t good test takers” just aren’t as smart as they like to think they are
Chief
100% agree.
In my opinion, it doesn't measure intelligence, but measures students' test taking skills and study habits outside of school for the first time. Most students need to motivate themselves and study outside of the classrooms.
Referring back to original question "can you define and measure intelligence", you are not measuring how intelligent they are in certain areas, but you are comparing one's performance to another's in certain areas. In your example with plumbing, who defines the "quickly learning" plumbing skills? Someone might learn it in 1 day, and I might take 30 days. Does that mean I'm not intelligent? But if I compare myself to other people who don't know anything about plumbing, then I should be intelligent. And this goes to your spatial reasoning example too. What's the definition of learning it slowly? You can't define this, but you need to compare your performance to another hence going back to strengths and weaknesses.
How do you know if they all only had weaknesses and zero strengths? They certainly might be in a wrong field but that shouldn't mean they are not good at anything. What if they are good at cooking? Or painting and drawing? You never know, and it's not right for you to judge and say they have zero strengths and basically useless.
Rising Star
I’m super smart but just not a good test taker.
Funny though - you never hear the opposite argument.
I know a lot of “A” students that excelled at school/tests but really were just dumb outside of that
Not really but its not bad for a single test. People who think SATs increase equality may not be right, though I’m not an expert - yes they are affected by family income like everything else, but how else will a kid from rural kentucky or from reno get noticed by a top college? They have tens of thousands of applications to go through
It’s easier to buy/use connections for: good extracurriculars, an impressive/unpaid summer internship, good grades in homeworks done with a tutor looking over your shoulder, putting pressure on your kids teachers to give them a good grade. At least with the SAT it’s just you in the exam, though yes of course tutoring can help
Just my own anecdote: scored 1740/2400 on my SAT after 3 tries. Grew up poor, 1st-Gen, bad school. Went to top-20 school (where median SAT was ~2250) and graduated with 3.75 GPA in econ & another major. For me, I think SAT was awful at predicting my college GPA or success post-school (IB, consulting, Fulbright, top MBA, etc.)
Pro
And by poor, do you mean lower middle class, or truly poor? First gen college, or first gen American?
It doesn’t measure intelligence, but it certainly requires some amount of intelligence.
Rising Star
People can score within a range. Prep will bring you to the higher end of your range.
But an 1100 kid isn’t becoming a 1550 kid from prep. In that sense, it measures IQ, and work ethic.
Chief
Absolutely, that’s why I always mention my SAT score when I meet someone new
This is a good bit
There's a whole body of literature on this and I don't think we're going to resolve it today. If you are specifically interested in the SAT and what it can do, the college board has done analyses of this that they make available.
When faced with designing processes in real life for admission processes, the question is not just 'how well does this work', but also 'what do I have that's better?'
Isn’t there a pretty strong correlation between SAT and college success (e.g., college GPA)?
TIL! Thanks for teaching me the actual technical terms behind my theorizing haha
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What’s the alternative?
SAT is pretty good at determining your overall knowledge of vocabulary, reading comprehension, and algebra/geometry.
In general, a child from a high income household/family will have more knowledge because they are exposed to more vocabulary, books, mathematics from an early age. This comes from their schools, their peers, their parents, and other factors.
For example (and I know outside of what the SAT tests) if you have never heard/studied Portuguese or a Romance language, you would do worse off on a Portuguese test than someone who speaks Spanish. Is the Spanish speaker smarter or more intelligent than you? No. But they’ve been exposed to more (Spanish has similar foundation to Portuguese) of what is being tested and inherently will on average perform better.
Same thing applies to English vocabulary (and therefore reading comprehension) and mathematics. Someone exposed to algebraic principles from an early age (I.e., many Asian children) will do better in math to someone who was taught algebra in high school. Those people, in general, will do better in college admission tests and in college (also likely in the work force). In my opinion that doesn’t indicate intelligence, but preparedness for white collar career progression.
This is a SUPER flawed logic. If you do an analysis more people with economically weak backgrounds get "PERFECT" score as this is the only ticket to get into the white collar league. I believe that a "Person" makes the choice if he is willing to put in the effort required to learn the patterns and build speed to get to a GOOD SAT score. Most libraries in US has good books available to learn. What this translates into is that you can have this individual scale faster in firms later on in most scenarios which society calls as intelligence. US is a messed up state on education front, too much is taught to shift mind to kids to give reasons for failure leaned towards society rather than individual or family effort. Parents are not responsible, only place person is born or growing up is responsible which can have some impact but with human potential they can easily overcome in this country. Every human if desired can work up the ladder in this country[US] that provides so many tools and opportunities with a very supportive people/government. More narratives like oh SAT can only be cracked by rich affluent neighborhoods, push people to limit themselves and their mindset into seeing them to be able to achieve higher grounds.
Answer your specific question - Intelligence is ability to acquire knowledge and apply skills and it can exist with a Non-SAT individual as well but SAT high performing score provides insight that this individual can do that if he/she/they are motivated around that skill/task.
I just don’t get how else we are supposed to standardized applications for college without one country wide test? In my local high school if you could walk and breathe you had a 4.0 GPA (not to mention the loads of kids with above 4.0). I had a friend who would routinely turn stuff in a month late and get a 100% on it. Meanwhile, kids in the next town over had to work their ass off to do well. Why wouldn’t we want a country wide system to determine aptitude?
Why should I be tested on the math and science before I actually go to school for it? Not all high schools are created equal, which means not all students would be setup to pass the requisite “math and science” testing.
The SAT is generalized for a reason
To a certain extent. That being said, I was also able to “buy” a few hundred points by hiring a tutor (that I paid for with my own money from working a summer job), so it’s not perfect.
The average gain from test prep used to be much smaller. Efforts to make the sat more of a test of achievement and less of intelligence have made it more coachable.
Chief
I think it’s a decent tool. Not sure what else we could do.
Rising Star
It’s critical to consider immigration when we talk about both household income and SAT scores. A low household income and low SAT score for immigrants, especially for immigrants who haven’t mastered English and are not used to standardized testing, SAT is not a measure of intelligence nor future success. As an immigrant, I had a low SAT score and became highly successful, high income. Actually, my entire circle of immigrant friends are successful, and they all came from low income households and didn’t have stellar SAT scores. Some of them became millionaires through business ventures. It’s not just my personal experience, this is a common theme across immigrants.
There are many ways to measure intelligence and a standardized test isn’t the winning method, it’s flawed. Looking at the rest of the globe, they test the knowledge of subjects learned grade 9-12 and select subjects based on the profile of the university (economics vs IT etc).
Based on the research I’ve done, emotional intelligence is one of the key factors of success.
I don't think anyone thinks that non cognitive skills are irrelevant, but the questions we'd ask when determining processes would be a) to what extent is this baked in already via other indicators (like GPA, which we know that SAT has significant predictive validity on top of) and b) do you lose its informational value if you explicitly try to include it, as people coach it the way they do the SAT? Being able to show that it's predictive when it's not actually being used in an admissions process is not very meaningful.
Regarding financial success, I don't think anyone has claimed that's what the SAT is trying to get at -- it's for college performance, and it does that pretty well, relative to other things we have access to.