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<p>If you want someone to plan selling kool aid in Albania or Tajikistan or Zambia, you might find it difficult to recruit suitably qualified US citizens.</p>
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<p>On the contrary, what you are doing is exactly what I want to see. It is in your best interest and also in mine. If you are thinking about the infinity group of the unprepared…their perspective, however, may differ from ours. </p>
<p>After looking it over, I think I see where the mix-up is now. @blossom, in my initial response to you I was talking about the parents who think SAT scores are meaningless. You thought I was talking about the recruiters, am I correct?</p>
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<p>Okay, what does that even mean?</p>
<p>Canuckguy, how about the people who think that SAT scores are meaningful? Do you think there may be a little bit of motivated cognition there? Perhaps some modest correlation with people who – and/or whose children – scored well on the SAT?</p>
<p>Yes- I think that SAT scores are meaningful. Not because they tell me that someone is noble or honest or kind or curious. But because if you hand me 1,000 resumes of 22 year old’s graduating from a wide range of colleges, all wanting to work in a big company doing X (whatever X is), the scores are a meaningful (i.e. not arbitrary) way of telling me who is likely to be able to analyze a chart or a graph after being taught some basic tools. The scores are a meaningful way of telling me who is more likely or less likely to be able to take a 100 page report and read it, understand it, and then write a four page executive summary. </p>
<p>From the 1,000 I can pick the 100 or 80 that I want to interview- by then considering their college transcript, leadership activities, GPA, etc.</p>
<p>I could of course decide that I’m only interviewing candidates whose names begin with the letter A. That would whittle the pile. Or- like the good old days- decide that I’m not interviewing anyone who is female or has an obviously “foreign” or ethnic name. Or only interview kids who went to Princeton.</p>
<p>Like or not, weeding out by SAT scores is a more reasonable first cut than what used to happen.</p>
<p>Is there a correlation between my preference for using scores and my own (or my kids) SAT scores? Maybe but then so what? There’s a correlation between the fact that I got a polio vaccine in early childhood and that I like the Beatles. Not that those two things are at all relevant. But surely correlated. Most kids born in the US in the 1950’s got a polio vaccine; most kids born in the US in the 1950’s grew up with the Beatles. But getting a polio vaccine doesn’t make you love the Beatles.</p>
<p>@Hrdsb4 I think he is pushing all the right buttons and saying what we want to hear. I prefer a straight shooter. Much of what he said made a lot of sense, however.</p>
<p>@JHS Of course there is. The difference is that empirical evidence is solidly on their side:
<a href=“Do standardized tests matter? | Nathan Kuncel | TEDxUMN - YouTube”>Do standardized tests matter? | Nathan Kuncel | TEDxUMN - YouTube;
Disclaimer: I have no skin in the game; we don’t do SAT here.</p>
<p>Canuckguy: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>You realize that, with one exception, all the data presented in that talk about the correlation between standardized tests and actual success involved graduate-school admissions tests, not the SAT or ACT? The one exception looked at self-selected 13 year-olds who took the SAT and – what a surprise! – kids who got in the 700s in 8th grade turn out to have lots of accomplishments as a group.</p></li>
<li><p>While the tests are decent predictors of relative future success for a group, they are actually pretty inadequate at the individual level. It’s exciting to psychology professors that there is a statistically valid .25 correlation between higher SAT scores and some measure of actual success. But it’s a crappy basis for choosing between Person A and Person B to say that Person A’s score means there’s a 25% chance that he or she will do 5% better than Person B on some meaningful measure. If the test scores were all the information available, you might have to live with a lousy basis for judgment like that. But in fact, there are reams of information available, the cumulative weight of which far exceeds that of the test scores. That’s why McKinsey et al. look at test scores as an initial screen, but then throw them out and make their hiring decisions based on much more refined, interactive, non-standardized tests. And they are in a business where essentially their business model is We Rent Academic Ability.</p></li>
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<p>SAT is a test where a trained whatever can do well, as long the training is good. To use that as an indicator of intelligence is … not very intelligent. I have been interviewing in management consulting for more than a decade and it never occurred to me to check someone’s SAT scores. Or GMAT scores. Or GRE scores. Or whatever. Also, McK doesn’t look for academic abilities as that can always be taught. It looks for intellectual abilities, which is innate and can’t be taught. Smart people are precious commodities and there are only so few of them. (I am not talking street smart here, that’s of no use in solving complex problems.) To figure out whether a candidate is smart you just have to give him/her a very hard problem solving exercise that took a group of smart people months to solve, and see what the candidate does in 20 mins. It’s not the answer that matters, it’s the thinking, the structuring, and analyzing. STEM is superbly good training for these kind of things. I mean, it’s just plain intelligence and logic.</p>
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<p>Of the MIT grads that I knew entering finance, none of them were interviewing for a middle market lending officer in a regional bank. Quite a few of them were interviewing at Goldman / DE Shaw / AQR / etc. </p>
<p>^ Indeed DE Shaw is a big sponsor for MIT student activities:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.battlecode.org/sponsors/[/url]”>https://www.battlecode.org/sponsors/</a></p>
<p>@JHS 1) I think you are splitting hair here. They are all IQ tests because they heavily tap into “g”. If you prefer, I can easily substitute the TED talk with this:
<a href=“What do SAT and IQ tests measure? General intelligence predicts school and life success.”>http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_general_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html</a>
Motivated cognition is powerful, isn’t it? How many times have I heard here that standardized tests are only good at predicting who are good at standardized tests.</p>
<p>2) What we do know is that standardized testing correlates higher with job performance than any other measure. The only other measure that is even close is one of the Big Fives-conscientiousness. Since intelligence and conscientiousness are not highly correlated, combining the two will give the best result.
In an earlier post I said the selection process at BCG and Bain (the Manzi article) is the best I have read. No one is suggesting that only standardize tests are needed in the hiring process; that would be just as foolhardy as leaving it out, given what we know. I would love to know how McKinsey recruit; perhaps @User51969 can enlighten us. Can they do any more than what Manzi has already said, screening candidates by standardized test scores, college courses taken, GPA, and a series of interviews that are likely of the structured variety? (I suspect structured interviews are also tapping into intelligence and conscientiousness to a great degree, but in a less predictable way).
As far as what experts can and cannot do, you may find this as interesting as I did. What was said about “college counsellors” is particularly pertinent to us:</p>
<p><a href=“Everybody’S an Expert | The New Yorker”>Everybody’S an Expert | The New Yorker;
<p>“I would love to know how McKinsey recruit; perhaps @User51969 can enlighten us. Can they do any more than what Manzi has already said, screening candidates by standardized test scores, college courses taken, GPA, and a series of interviews that are likely of the structured variety? (I suspect structured interviews are also tapping into intelligence and conscientiousness to a great degree, but in a less predictable way).”</p>
<p>I am all over McKinsey in my professional life; I’ve worked collegially with them with years, my company double-teams with them on certain projects, my former boss started an independent company that was bought by McKinsey a few years ago, and my very BFF in the world is a McKinseyite. Granted, these people came into McKinsey mid-career versus early twenties, but they do interviewing, and I absolutely guarantee that McKinsey is looking for “soft” factors that aren’t quantifiable just as much as they are looking for harder measures of intelligence via test scores, GPAs, etc.<br>
Those things include pleasant assertiveness, ablity to create connections, an ability to read a situation and know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, the ability to listen and reflect, the ability to integrate what a client says into what you know are best practices, creativity, ability to command attention / respect in a meeting, ability to present well, etc. - none of which are captured in hard measures that so many of you seem to overlook as you try so mightily to come up with The Magic Algorithm. </p>
<p>^I am not surprised. Manzi did say that Bain and BCG’s battery of interviews have not only problem solving cases but also “let’s talk about you and us” discussions. The final selection too is done holistically.</p>
<p>Looking for The Magic Algorithm is of course silly. I am interested, however, in what parents can do given what we now know. Mine graduated right in the middle of The Great Recession. While they are gainfully employed, many of their friends are still struggling to gain traction. Another observation is that the new hires fairly consistently out-perform their older colleagues once they have 2-3 years of experience under their belt. My suspicion is that this younger generation is simply under-employed.</p>
<p>There are many very wise parents on this board. I like to know what you have done to help your loves ones through this difficult time period. This information may be very useful for young parents and new students alike. I find @shawbridge’s future waves most helpful.</p>
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<li><p>unless your kid needs to stay local because of dialysis or chemo, remind your child that this is a very big country and if there are no jobs for new grads in Montclair New Jersey or Newton Massachusetts, that doesn’t mean that he or she is unemployable. Cast a wide net.</p></li>
<li><p>unless your kid is the one in 1,000 who will start his or her career on third base, everyone else starts with an entry level job. It may mean doing something boring on occasion. It will likely mean showing up early and staying late. No, you won’t be discussing Proust at your Monday morning status meetings, but that doesn’t mean that your organization does not value your education or is exploiting you.</p></li>
<li><p>As Woody Allen said- 98% of life is just showing up. The job-hunting version of that is, you need to be out there. Sitting on the couch at your frat house or your girlfriend’s apartment every night of your senior year complaining that there are no jobs is not a winning strategy. You are not going to meet people who can help you professionally by doing that. The kids who volunteer to run (or just participate in) community projects in their college towns- these are the kids who meet the corporate CEO or EVP who is the liaison to the United Way; the head of media relations for the cool software company your kid is dying to work for; the head of HR for the cable TV network. </p></li>
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<p>People who hire sit on boards, they volunteer for stuff, they are usually favorably impressed by college kids who do the same. Tell your kids to get out there. Not at the expense of their studies; not instead of working for a professor or editing/proofreading the campus newspaper since these are also fantastic ways to “show up”. But if your kid is majoring in beer pong at college, this is not a useful launching strategy.</p>
<p>Canuck- I have many more suggestions but these are good conversation starters for now.</p>
<p>My husband’s advice to our kids graduating during the recession was to stay in graduate school as long as possible, because your first job/salary may determine your future opportunities. Our kids turned in dissertations after they had an appropriate job offer in hand. They didn’t stay in academics.</p>
<p>Canuckguy: is your question how parents can successfully advise kids into jobs, or particularly about consulting jobs and silicon valley jobs? or even more specifically, actually McKinsey and Google?</p>
<p>Your post kind of surprised me, and perhaps I’ve been kind of misreading you all along.</p>
<p>I always really appreciate @blossom reminding the kids how important it is to understand that in spite of what they show in the movies, the first job is not as glamorous or essential to the business as they might have hoped it was going to be. </p>
<p>Poet- thanks for the shout-out. I recently ran into the daughter of neighbors who is now a hot-shot producer for a tv network. (She majored in sociology- so group hug to all the folks who claim you’ll never get a job unless you study STEM). Anyway- she reminded me that her first job was shlepping the equipment off the news truck and wielding the can of hairspray before the anchor went “live” on location. </p>
<p>I know so many entertainment industry “wannabee’s” and they all think their first job will involve advising the president of the network on daypart strategies or helping the head of comedy development land the next Seinfeld. They certainly don’t think they will be standing in front of a house fire in Dayton, Ohio, or in front of a collapsed roof in Buffalo, NY, making sure the earpiece is connected to the microphone, or that the anchor doesn’t have a piece of spinach stuck in her teeth.</p>
<p>And yet- that seems to be the way great entertainment exec’s are made. Go figure.</p>
<p>From the article right at the beginning, it was stated that the problem with some of the top-rated college graduates was not the actual educational credentials but the lack of “intellectual humility” among many, which impedes the iterative learning process. As the article continued: it’s the applicant’s conceit that “if something goes right it must be because I’m a genius” but “if something goes wrong it’s because someone [else] is an idiot” that was the complaint. For those whose kids and relatives from top schools work for Google, maybe they had the right intellectual outlook while others didn’t.</p>
<p>@Blossom. My H, who was in finance, a quant type trader, started out running to get Mountain Dew for people and lunch,. They hired him, paid him a signing bonus and made him do errands all day long while he learned the business. If he’d been a primadonna? And there were many. He’d have never made it. I hear the people on here discuss the glamorous world of finance and I laugh. It’s grunt work, and then it’s 18 hour days, and then… It’s not pretty. </p>