Jane — as someone who’s spent some time studying testing, I can assure you that the SAT is a great way to tell how smart someone is, and if you factor in high-school GPA, you can get a measure of a person’s diligence as well. If there’s a better way to identify smart, hardworking kids who will excel at non-manual tasks, colleges have yet to find it.

Unfortunately, because our employment-discrimination laws are a mess, it’s very difficult to ask for an applicant’s SAT score if you’re anything but a college. Different racial groups have different average SAT scores — meaning that using the SAT in hiring will have a “disparate racial impact.” That’s illegal, unless you can prove that the SAT not merely correlates with job performance, but is directly related to it.

I also wrote about this here.