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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Steve Sailer's "Test Case""

14 Comments -

1 – 14 of 14
Anonymous tommy said...

Job testing began in imperial China two millennium ago. Early Jesuit missionaries to the Middle Kingdom were so impressed by the efficiency of mandarin administrators that they brought back to Europe the notion of competitive examinations. Prussia was the first to try it.

According to Max Weber, it was actually the underlings to these administrators that did most of the hard work of running China. Those who passed the exams tended to spend a lot of their time writing poetry, philosophizing, and the like.

11/30/07, 12:29 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, crypto-quotas produce an inferior workforce compared to honest ethnic quotas, which at least would hire the best from each group.

OK, why not have honest quotas then?

11/30/07, 1:31 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Honest quotas and honest testing would be better than crypto-quotas and no testing (or phony testing, as with the new New York Fire Department test).

11/30/07, 1:39 AM

Anonymous bjdouble said...

The best evidence of low hiring standards is high retention, and the USG has very low turnover.

11/30/07, 5:24 AM

Anonymous poolside said...

Fascinating post.

My father was a career government employee (not based in D.C.) -- college educated and a veteran.

I remember hearing his constant complaints about the quality of people his agency could hire following the dumbing down and finally the elimination of standardized tests.

He hated Jimmy Carter for abolishing the PACE.

He saw the writing on the wall when so many white, college-educated men were being forced out of the agency in favor of minorities. This started happening in the '70s -- the lowering of standards of professionalism and service in order to create a "diverse" environment.

Eventually, he, too, was forced to retire when a new minority boss told him his "time was up."

Of course, he still had a good 15 years of work in him and he went on to teach high school for more than a decade.

11/30/07, 6:34 AM

Anonymous mercer said...

"OK, why not have honest quotas then?"

I agree with Steve, that it would be better technically but, politically it lets a lot of air out of the tires of egalitarian dogma. Considering how shrill, enduring and inflexible the rhetoric has been from the various factions of the "The Mans Keeping Me Down" chorus its a climb-down that would be psychologically and politically near impossible.

11/30/07, 9:26 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is wonderful how social norms fade. When I went off to college (1980) everyone had heard of the "civil service exam" and associated things like "veteran's preference." In those halcyon days of yore people who wanted government jobs thought they would have to prepare and compete for them. Now? So far as I can tell, young people think that the Feds rank job applicants mainly by skin color, then hire the darkest first.

11/30/07, 9:35 AM

Anonymous Lugash said...

I am Lugash.

Look at the State Department's selection criteria:

http://www.careers.state.gov/officer/who-qualifies.html

They're looking for people with an amazingly broad skillset compared to private industry. No wonder the Foreign Service Officer Test is said to be such a bitch to pass.

Most employers look to pay for the most minimal skill set and intelligence that they can. This is why jobs are broken down into such small chunks.

The State Department is looking for highly intelligent generalists. While they probably don't get paid what they should there are other benefits, such as adventure, experiencing foreign cultures etc.

Also, on the "343", go to the NYFD website. Not a single white man to be found on the front page or in the job photos. We've been dropped down the memory black hole again.

I am Lugash

11/30/07, 11:12 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fred Lynch's 1997 book on Diversity has a discussion of some of these points. It's a nice complement to Steve's article.

David
Irvine, CA

11/30/07, 11:20 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I actually think this is a really good post. Steve is pointing to a real problem. It's not just that the Feds can't give IQ tests, they can't give tests that even correlate too much with IQ, which any decent achievement test will do.

The Foreign Service seems to be an exception, though, the FS exam is pretty tough. Also, there are some special intern programs under which the Federal government has been pretty successful at getting good Masters degree grads from Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Berkeley. Also, the Justice Department gets good lawyers from top schools.

I think the problem is more severe at the state and local than the Federal level.

MQ

11/30/07, 12:49 PM

Anonymous SKT said...

When I was at Cornell, I went to seminar on interviewing. The first statement that they made there was that, "What correlates best with on the job performance is standardized testing. Studies have shown that the interview has almost no ability to predict how well someone will work at a company. That said, American companies still like to interview." I always found that to be interesting. My impression is that the interview allows bosses to discriminate in favor of people that they like personally so they can have them on their team, though this has not been shown to benefit productivity or output.

The truth is that the American people don't have much of an appetite for competitive examinations. Sure, there's the SAT, and graduate school tests like the MCAT and LSAT. But the educational institutions look at many factors beyond that like extracurricular experience and GPA. In most other countries, the standardized test is all matters for entrance. And for job hiring, it's rare to see exams in America.

This contrasts strongly with other countries like India, where skilled job placement is almost entirely determined by exams. Even in Europe, exams are a much bigger deal in most countries than they are in the U.S.

12/1/07, 12:03 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

bjdouble: "The best evidence of low hiring standards is high retention, and the USG has very low turnover."

I'm sorry, but this is complete nonsense. Some of the highest turnover rates are found in the most menial jobs: food service, retail sales, and so forth. I once worked as a supervisor at a low-end call center. It had turnover rates of over 100 percent a year.

12/1/07, 4:47 PM

Anonymous I am not Lugash said...

"The best evidence of low hiring standards is high retention[.]"

???

Is that the new management philosophy of the month? "Keep firing 'em and hiring 'em - it keeps 'em on their toes - we don't want anyone too complacent - continuous chaos and institutional amnesia are the bulwark of productivity."

Similar to the "hit the ground running" philosophy. "We want a hire who can hit the ground running; no learning-curvers. What? The 31st hire in that position also asked for more than one minute of training? Broom the ***hole and hire number 32 - why can't we find good people?"

12/3/07, 7:48 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A few years ago when I was about to graduate from college I took the FSOT and found it to be surprisingly easy. After reading online about how hard it used to be and skimming through a cultural dictionary to bone up on a few things, I was expecting it to be a hell of a test. The reality was that it's pretty much a joke to weed out idiots. The real selection process comes from the resumes and essays. Interestingly, the parts I remember were identifying who Irving Berlin was and labelling an unknown country (Eritrea) on a map. I'm pretty sure any reasonably intelligent person with knowledge of American history, basic economics, and high school algebra could pass the test.

12/13/13, 4:44 PM

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