This paper studies how schooling admission tests affect economic performance in an economy where individuals are endowed both with academic and non academic abilities and either ability matters for labour productivity. We show that the outcome of these abilities varies both with the degree of correlation of these abilities in the population and with the productive contribution of each ability. When abilities are poorly correlated, as documented in the literature, a standard test based only on academic abilities is expected to yield lower total output than a more balanced test that considers both ability types. Contrary to this expectation, we show that this is not a general result. We also show that the outcome of an encompassing test can be replicated by a sequential testing strategy, with government held schools testing academic abilities and firms testing non academic abilities on the sub-sample of graduates of elite schools.