Do you, illustrious job-seeking Adult Human Person, remember your SAT scores? Or have you let those once-definitive high school markers float out of your brain, along with trigonometry and the French pluperfect tense? If you're looking for a new gig and don't keep decade-old printouts from the College Board in your wallet, you may have a problem: it turns out a whole lot of employers still care about your standardized test scores.
The Wall Street Journal reports that many employers—including companies like Goldman Sachs and Bain & Co.—also reportedly use SAT scores to evaluate applicants, believing that the standardized test scores still hold up as solid indications of brainpower. Some hiring managers say they predominantly use the scores to gauge applicants just out of college, which makes some sense considering recent graduates don't have stacked resumes outside of their GPAs and internships. "When you're hiring people and they don't have a lot of work experience, you have to start with some set of data points," Eric Eden, a spokesman for Virginia-based event management software company Cvent Inc., told the WSJ.
Then again, if you've been navigating the working world for some time, having to whip out scores from a test you took when you still thought Led Zeppelin was the raddest seems a little unnecessary. "I don't see why it's relevant," Stephen Morse, who turned down a job interview with a communications company after learning they would need his SAT scores, said. It also doesn't help that minorities tend to get lower standardized test scores, which could hurt them when it comes to getting jobs even if they attended top universities. Plus, there's always a chance that candidate rocking a 2350 used one of these guys.
And if it's not frustrating enough to learn your SAT scores may follow you well past your submission of the Common App., more and more research has indicated the tests may not be that useful to college admissions officers anymore. About 800 accredited four-year universities no longer require SAT and ACT test scores, and a recent study found nearly no difference in the collegiate GPAs of the students who submitted scores and those who did not. Is the SAT just a way to keep Big Pencil afloat?
