Academic skill test s are successful precisely because they involve criterion sampling for the most part. As already pointed out, the Scholastic Aptitude Test taps skills that the teacher is looking for and will give high grades for. No one could object if it had been recognized widely that this was all that was going on when aptitude tests were used to predict who would do well in school. Trouble started only when people assume that these skills had some more general validity , as implied in the use of words like intelligence. Yet, even a little criterion analysis would show that there are almost no occupations or life situations that require a person to do word analogies, choose the most correct of four alternative meanings of a word, etc.