The Role of SAT Scores and Ivy League Admissions in Predicting Success (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: At a university like Harvard, any of the Ivy Leagues, it's very, very difficult to get in, right? So there's far more applicants than there are positions and they use the SAT as one of the entry criteria. So you have to have a very high SAT score and then generally you have to be good at at least one or two other things to be considered. And a very large percentage, for example, of Harvard undergraduates, and there's only about 4,000 of them so it's a rather small school, were valedictorians of their class. They have very high SAT scores and the SAT is a proxy for IQ. The people who administer the SAT don't like to admit that, but there's absolutely no doubt that it's the case because any set of questions that assess general knowledge and problem-solving, ability you can derive an IQ score from. And so part of the advantage of hiring an Ivy League graduate isn't the fact that they went to a high quality school. It's the fact that it was impossible to get in and so the screening has been done for the employee, for the employer by the admissions process at the school. And the same thing is true of business schools and the business, the people who run business schools know that, is that the primary value that they offer, and again this is not the case with every business school, is the fact that if you hire an MBA from their program, and it's a very selective program, then you have a very high probability of hiring someone who's intrinsically intelligent and conscientious. And that's a great predictor, those are great predictors of long-term success. So, and what would you expect in a society that's essentially meritocratic? It's pretty straightforward to think this through. Not only should people who are faster and smarter be more productive, especially if they're hard-working, but that's really what you'd want, isn't it? I mean, how the hell do you want to set up your society? You want to set up your society so that incompetent people who do nothing succeed? That, first of all, that can't happen.