I practically wrote my own rejection letter for Canonical. Their interview process required doing multiple long form writing responses, including telling them why I was an amazing High School student. I wasn't, and I'm quite proud of how much I've changed since then. As if the jerk from 1996 had any bearing on anything of relevance. Laughable.
I don't want to be surrounded by people who can still brag about high school.
I had a very similar experience with Canonical when I was looking for my first job. The entire tone of the transaction was very negative and passive aggressive. It made me nervous about their work culture so I decided not to continue the application process. I'm still a bit bummed about it since I would have loved to work in that space.
Saying that SAT scores correlate closely with income in response to someone claiming that SAT scores measure IQ could be a statement of agreement or disagreement, depending on the relationships among the various measures.
I am disagreeing - why would more money make you inherently smarter? His premise that smart parents make more more is unquestionably false when 99% (or something) of wealth is transferred via inheritance - people don't generally get rich anymore[1].
Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
It's not that more money would make you inherently smarter, but rather that more intelligent parents might (statistically) both make more money and also have more intelligent children.
Those children might go on to score better on the SAT, leaving a correlation between parental income and SAT scores that would be unsurprising at each step.
Your point about inherited wealth is not demonstrated on the chart you showed, which was parental incomes (not wealth) and in ranges unlikely to be perturbed by vast inheritances.
> Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
I don't want to; I suspect colleges and D. E. Shaw felt like SAT scores were an acceptable/practical proxy for whatever purpose it was that they had. I thought it was weird and slightly off-putting to be asked, but it seems to work for them.
I've talked to some Canonical interviewers and they all were perfectly nice. No "high school brag" vibe at all. I suspect people who wrote those long form questions and people who actually do the interviews are completely different departments and the latter have no much influence on the former.
I don't want to be surrounded by people who can still brag about high school.