Is Testing And Making Sure People Are Qualified Really Racism?

[Heracles 417]

Setting standards to meet the job requirements is different from setting standards that exceed beyond the job duties. The whole hiring process is to find applicants who are qualified to do the job and they were excluding applicants who test scores were well within qualified to do the job.

Man you truly are a union guy at heart hey.

Quality need not be a criteria, just the guarantee of a job.

Improvement of educational standards in black and minority areas needed then? Depends on contents of the test I suppose.

What many forget is that I cannot force people in the AA community to want to learn.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

It would be discriminatory to anyone who can't lift 100 lbs. You cloud the issue by talking about what demographic those people might fit into.

When an employer has a basic criteria and finds that there are too many applicants that meet that criteria, he has every right to increase that criteria in order to find the best candidates. Of course, in your lifting example, if the ability to lift 100 lbs had nothing to do with the job, then I could see how there would be complaints. Nonetheless, it would be within the employers right to do so. However, the employer is a moron and you're better off not working there anyways.

On the other hand, when you have a test which contains questions that are all relevant(and since you can qualify by answering any 65% of the questions, one would assume all the questions are relevant), differentiating people based on their scores is a reasonable practice.

Now imagine if an employer realized that by raising the test score, they were excluding a disproportionately higher number of applicants based on race? That's where it becomes an issue. These applicants qualified for the job, but were being excluding from consideration.

[rsn 135]

Now imagine if an employer realized that by raising the test score, they were excluding a disproportionately higher number of applicants based on race? That's where it becomes an issue. These applicants qualified for the job, but were being excluding from consideration.

I guess I would wonder why this is the case. Shouldn't the most qualified applicants ALWAYS have an advantage over applicants who have not performed as well on the test? Regardless of what the FD says they are doing, I would expect any applicant who scores higher than another applicant to be awarded the job, all other things being equal. I'm not sure how race should factor into their decision.

[SMOKE 1,426]

Now imagine if an employer realized that by raising the test score, they were excluding a disproportionately higher number of applicants based on race? That's where it becomes an issue. These applicants qualified for the job, but were being excluding from consideration.

so are you saying the better qualified applicants should not have an advantage in the hiring process because of their race?

[ValerieA 350]

On the other hand, when you have a test which contains questions that are all relevant(and since you can qualify by answering any 65% of the questions, one would assume all the questions are relevant), differentiating people based on their scores is a reasonable practice.

But were the questions relevant? I haven't seen a list of questions.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I guess I would wonder why this is the case. Shouldn't the most qualified applicants ALWAYS have an advantage over applicants who have not performed as well on the test? Regardless of what the FD says they are doing, I would expect any applicant who scores higher than another applicant to be awarded the job, all other things being equal. I'm not sure how race should factor into their decision.

I've been in a supervising role and from my own personal experience, it's not always the brightest who make the best employees. I think a lot of people here would be perpetually unemployed if every employer only hired the brightest. You can see the same thing in sports where often times, the top draft picks get lost and forgotten while some athletes turn into superstars when they were virtually ignored in the draft. Tests are not an absolute indicator of finding the best employees, but they can demonstrate aptitude needed for job requirements. Beyond that, they don't mean much but have been used before to exclude certain groups of people from being hired.

[Jenn! 918]

Regardless of what the FD says they are doing, I would expect any applicant who scores higher than another applicant to be awarded the job, all other things being equal.

But you can't ignore what the FD says they are doing. The first step of the hiring process is the test, which weeds out unqualified candidates. Say there was one position and 100 total applicants. Also say that a 60 is the benchmark for a qualified candidate. If 20 applicants got above a 60, then all 20 get to move on to the next step: physical tests, interviews, what have you. Instead what they did was say that 80 is the new benchmark. It just so happened (if we give the FD the benefit of the doubt) that the 10 guys who scored above 80 were white. The 10 guys that scored between 60 and 79 were black.

I can see the issue here. I hope they decided the new standard without knowledge of the races and scores of individual applicants.

This was not a "whoever scores the highest gets the job" scenario. The test is just one step.

Edited May 24, 2010 by Jenn!

[one...two...tree 2,762]

so are you saying the better qualified applicants should not have an advantage in the hiring process because of their race?

Higher scores above the needed qualified score doesn't necessarily equate to better applicants. That's a misnomer.

[SMOKE 1,426]

Higher scores above the needed qualified score doesn't necessarily equate to better applicants. That's a misnomer.

that wasn't the question.

Edited May 24, 2010 by SMOKE

[rsn 135]

Higher scores above the needed qualified score doesn't necessarily equate to better applicants. That's a misnomer.

Assuming everything else is equal, I'm not sure how you can justify not hiring the applicants w/ the highest scores.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

so are you saying the better qualified applicants should not have an advantage in the hiring process because of their race?

It's called affirmative action and why many sectors (see education) have gone to pure ####### over the past couple of decades.

White Person scores: 100

White Person scores: 99

White Person scores: 99

White Person scores: 97

Black Person scores: 90

Only 4 are allowed to be taken and we don't want to be considered racist/get sues, so we are forced to ignore the higher qualified individual and take the lower qualified individual.

It's not racism, it's the way it is.

The "minimum" standard might be 65 in this court case, but they had so many applicants and so many exceptional applicants (those who scored above 88) that they took those who were exceptionally qualified.

Those who don't get this, decry discrimination against a race because a particular race isn't as educated for whatever reason. That's not the fault of the fire department or any company for that matter. If a white person, black person, asian person, hispanic person, etc. are all given the same exact test, then those who score the highest naturally should be awarded positions first and foremost.

If that's hard for someone to comprehend without crying discrimination, then perhaps they should not have applied for that position to begin with if they knew there was a chance of failure.

[Peikko 1,575]

Thousands of black applicants who were deemed "qualified" sued and won. A federal judge said the city had known that the 89 cutoff score was "statistically meaningless" and that there was no proof that those who scored higher on the test made better applicants.

It all depends if that is true. If it is true, then it is as Steve suggests, something about the test discriminated against perfectly acceptable black candidates. It is possible for a test to skew in favour of certain types of candidates and it perfectly possible that the skew did not determine a greater suitability of those favoured candidates as firemen beyond the basic qualifying standard.

[Deputy Purple 1,294]

Besides, didn't the article say that when they didn't fill the hiring needs from the "Extrememly Qualified" poll that they did dip into the "Qualified" pool?

So higher scores got first crack at the jobs, big deal it would work like that without the break at 89...

[_Simpson_ 250]

By raising the test score requirement from 65 to 89, when a score between 65 and 88 is acknowledged by the department as qualified, they were being discriminatory as the numbers of black applicants to the number of ones being hired was lopsided.

Are you suggesting that they picked 89% because they knew that a lot of Blacks wouldn't qualify. This is a method they've used for years.

But faced with a huge number of qualified applicants, the city created two groups: a "well-qualified" set of those who scored 89 or better, and a "qualified" group of those who scored 65 to 88.

When theres was to many applicants they decided to take the higher scores over the lower ones. I dont see what people are up in arms about.

Edited May 24, 2010 by _Simpson_

[KaiserD 12]

What many forget is that I cannot force people in the AA community to want to learn.

It's really not a colour thing as much as an economic class thing. In poorer areas there's a mentality that "why should I bother", that having an education means pretty little and they don't see how exams and studying = jobs and money. So I'm not even going to pretend that everyone wants to learn because there is definitely an unhelpful culture at play.

However poor schools in poor areas are still cr!ptastic. I live in a suburb but I really REALLY don't want my son to go to school here, I've seen the quality of them around here, teachers, equipment, grades (my USC husband has much younger sister + cousins) and it makes me want to run back to my village in the middle of nowhere (it makes my clearly average education look stellar). The schools in Runcorn, UK were no better, there was this little fact sheet I picked up in the Job Center in Halton BC with the GCSE rates that were absolutely abysmal.

I said something to this effect before, still don't know the best way to reverse such a catch 22. Can't teach kids with bad resources, good resources won't make much difference on kids who don't want to learn, schools turning out kids with bad grades are not gonna get as much funding anyways.

Assuming everything else is equal, I'm not sure how you can justify not hiring the applicants w/ the highest scores.

Well...El Buscador is right - a test should only be part of it. You wouldn't want an excellent scoring test participant who had an attitude problem and was not a good team player with other members of staff. That's gotta be important part of being in FD right? Candidates that had a passing score should have at least get a look in with interviews is what is being said here. Right? Though if you've only got time to interview 20 people it makes sense you're going to grab the 20 people with the very highest scores...