Actually, my wife (who is an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, see http://is.gd/cU4fWD for more details if interested) works for a company who does such testing... They do have to go to great measures to prove that the tests do not contain discriminatory bias against racial/gender/etc. However, many of the Fortune 500 companies in America utilize such testing (or else my wife's company, which is the biggest among many such providers in the US, would not exist) and in fact hire their own I/O's to design testing programs and oversee their administration.
In fact, at my last IT employer, I had to take the standardized "Wonderlic" test, and was told that if I didn't score high enough, I would not have been hired. It is used in the NFL as well, I have heard. - Will -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Palmer Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2012 10:47 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Candidate Recruiting On 08/03/12, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > I found out that its the office of affirmative action that says we > > can't > test > > candidates... > > What do you mean, can't test candidates? this is a fairly common policy. anti discrimination laws basically say that any generic test of intelligence must 1) be cognitively meaningful and 2) not be biased along racial/gender group differences. since just about any cognitively meaningful test will yield racial/gender empirical outcomes given our background society/culture, a lot of companies and HR folk have decided the combination of those two rules, when combined with the lack of any means of proving that your test is valid, and not racist or sexist, means they don't want to go anywhere near this issue. so blanket bans on tests like that are fairly common. -Chris --- Asst Coach, Lexington Debate: http://www.lexdebate.org Tournament Tab Software: http://www.tabroom.com _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
