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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

The White Firefighters Case -- How Accurate Is the Test?

By Kathy Stanchi

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I know much has been written about the Ricci v. DeStafano case, both pro and con. In this post, though, I want to focus on the test. Full disclosure: I'm a test skeptic. I think test results are overvalued for most jobs, I think most tests probably are inherently biased toward certain privileged members of society, and I think the overvaluation of tests has a discriminatory impact on marginalized groups. But, those (big) questions aside, has anyone raised the question of whether New Haven's test for firefighter captain really accurately predicts who will be a good captain? I confess I don't really know the details of either the test or the qualifications of the job. But I have some serious skepticism that a written test can really evaluate whether you will be a good leader of an emergency response team.

In my readings on how people make decisions (yes, I know, I haven't shut up yet), I learned that the NFL requires every quarterback in the draft to take an intelligence test (called the Wonderlic). This is the NFL's way of trying to gauge how good someone will be at making the kind of decisions quarterbacks have to make. The problem is that the test is wildly inaccurate for that purpose. Some of the most successful quarterbacks (Brett Favre, Terry Bradshaw, Dan Marino) had woeful Wonderlic scores, well below average. And some of the most forgettable quarterbacks (you've probably never heard of them), scored quite high. As it turns out, filling in bubbles in a written test has almost nothing to do with making decisions "in the pocket." It potentially weeds out great players, and elevates mediocre ones. The best way to tell whether someone will be good at something is testing their performance during a simulation of the actual job. Not a surprise, I'm sure, but in that case, how can written tests continue to be justified for jobs that do not involve that kind of decision-making?

I recognize that this question has broader implications -- including for legal education. Do law school exams really predict how lawyers will perform "in the pocket"? I am a skills teacher, so maybe I'm a little biased. But now, as law firms consider "apprenticeships" and other new models for legal hiring, I wonder whether it is time to rethink the centrality of the test.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on July 01, 2009 (boomark / email).