June 22, 2026
SATurday Night Hiring
Job application asked for my SAT scores
Startup asks job seekers for teenage test scores, and the internet is not okay
TLDR: A startup job listing asked applicants to include SAT scores and college grades, even years after school, and that instantly set off a fierce debate. Commenters split between calling it an honest intelligence filter and mocking it as creepy, outdated, and maybe even an accidental age test.
A startup job post turned into full-on comment-section theater after applicants noticed a wild requirement at the bottom: send your resume, your college grades, and yes, your SAT score — even if you took that test decades ago. The original poster was baffled. In a hiring world where many companies now say they care more about side projects, work samples, and what you can do today, this felt to many readers like being judged by your 17-year-old self.
That’s where the crowd really lit the match. One camp basically shrugged and said: look, old test scores may be weird, but they’re still a rough stand-in for intelligence. One commenter bluntly argued that brainpower stays fairly stable over life, so using the score for sorting isn’t crazy. Another even preferred it to the dreaded coding interview circus, calling this the more honest version of an intelligence screen.
But the backlash was much louder — and much funnier. Critics roasted the idea as a possible compliance test, a fake-merit filter, or even a sneaky way to screen by age. The biggest laugh came from the commenter who joked that only younger applicants would even remember their SAT scores. Then came the sleuthing: one user appeared to identify the company as Alpha Vantage, while another dropped a drive-by reference to Canonical, famous in some corners of tech gossip for a hiring process people love to complain about. Bottom line: the real application here may be for a role in the comments, where everyone is suddenly an expert in whether your teenage math score should follow you forever.
Key Points
- •The article centers on a startup job listing found through Y Combinator jobs that required applicants to submit undergraduate GPA and SAT or equivalent standardized test scores.
- •The listing stated that there were no cutoffs for GPA or test scores, but applications missing those metrics would be disqualified.
- •The article contrasts this requirement with a stated recent trend in tech and high-growth startups toward dropping degree requirements and emphasizing side projects and demonstrated initiative.
- •The article argues that SAT scores may correlate with professional success under ideal conditions but also describes multiple limitations in using decades-old scores for hiring decisions.
- •The article traces hiring assessments historically to military testing in 1917, including Robert Yerkes’s Army Alpha and Army Beta tests, and to assessment-center methods later studied by AT&T.