Right, in an ideal world we'd peer into the minds of people and compute what they know. But if we did that, our eyes would probably catch on fire like that lady in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

We need some way to distill the unbelievable amount of data in human brains into something that can be processed in a reasonable amount of time. We need a measurement - a degree, a GPA, something.

Imagine if in every job interview they could assume absolutely nothing. They know nothing about your education. They might start by asking you to recite your ABCs and then, finally at sunset, you might get to a coding exam. Which still won't work, because you'll just AI cheat the coding exam.

We require gatekeepers to make the system work. If we allow the gatekeepers to just rubber stamp based off of if stuff seems correct, that tells us nothing about the person itself. We want the measurement to get close to the real understanding.

That means AI papers have to be given a 0, which means we need to know if something is AI generated. And we want to catch this at the education level, not above.

I did have interviews with a government agency many years ago that, among other things, involved a battery of tests including what I assume were foreign civil service exams. I got an offer though I didn't take it.

But assuming in-person day long batteries of tests for universities and companies is probably not very practical.

You can argue whether university is a very efficient use of time or money but it presumably does involve some learning and offers potential employers some level of a filter that roughly aligns with what they're looking for.

Companies and governments use to do testing all the time. A number of lawsuits about those practices being discriminatory resulted in them going away.

No, they used to do IQ tests which were found discriminatory (and don't correlate with job performance). Tests and problems directly or indirectly related to the job are not only legal, but are commonly used (leetcode).

IQ tests are perfectly legal in US hiring, but you're right, they're not done because they don't work well.

Chicago police and fire had a lot of problems with their entrance exams and promotion exams. Don’t know if they were strictly IQ tests.