Employers, military, and colleges use aptitude tests to predict how well someone might perform. Recently, critics have said there isn't much difference in performance above a certain levelthat everyone is more or less the same. Now, in a current issue of Psychological Science, the authors of a new study find that this isn't true. Instead, the higher your score, the better you perform later. The investigation considered four large studies of people who have taken aptitude tests: the College Board's SAT scores for 150,000 students entering 110 colleges and their freshman GPA. The Army collected 5,000 scores for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and later appraised candidates on how well they did their jobs. Two additional data sets contained students' performance on tests in high school and their grades in college. The higher the test scores, the better the subsequent performance.

• Suggest alternative hypotheses that could equally explain this finding.