Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [414]
The race-norming question was a hot potato in the congressional debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1991. In the struggle to pass an act that President George H. W. Bush would not veto, congressmen who favored race norming had to yield to those who opposed it. The act as finally passed prohibited “test score adjustment” on the basis of race, and the practice has since been banned at all eighteen hundred state and local offices of the Employment Service.
How one views this matter—whether one considers referring job applicants on the basis of race norming a proper use or a misuse of testing—depends on one’s political philosophy.
We will spare ourselves a thorough review of the many other ways in which testing of one kind or another is, or can be, misused by opportunistic, misguided, inept, or extremist individuals. But three particularly suspect uses are worth noting:
Dumbing down: In the 1980s, when minority groups were militantly fighting against testing, one “solution” to the alleged unfairness of pre-employment tests was to revise them or modify their scoring so as to upgrade the scores of minority test takers. An example: In 1984 the Golden Rule Insurance Company of Indianapolis agreed not to use any tests in which the average scores of blacks were more than 10 percent lower than those of whites. In 1985 the state of Alabama reached a settlement under which it would not use teacher certification tests that produced differences greater than 5 to 10 percent between whites and blacks. In other cases, the solution has been to make the tests so easy that everyone can pass: In the early 1990s Texas gave a teacher examination that nearly 97 percent of candidates passed.52
For years, many states have deliberately made the tests schoolchildren take easy in order to create a fraudulent appearance of progress. This was so before the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, and although that law sought to achieve quality schooling in exchange for federal dollars, the dumbing-down tradition has continued. A recent study conducted by Policy Analysis for California Education, a research institute run by Stanford University and the University of California, found that many states were continuing to make their students look better than they were in reality. The study, as cited in a New York Times editorial, showed that “students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.”53 The New York Times reported in July 25, 2006, that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings had rejected as inadequate the testing systems of Maine and Nebraska; federal money will be withheld from both. Other states may be in jeopardy.
Honesty testing: “Integrity tests” have been marketed for several decades and their use by employers has recently grown substantially, and for two good reasons. One is that employee theft has been rising, year by year; various recent estimates range from $30 billion to $60 billion.54 The other is that in 1988 Congress passed the Employment Polygraph Protection Act, which prohibited the use of lie-detection equipment in most employment settings; as a result, the use of paper-and-pencil and computerized integrity tests soared. Some integrity tests probe attitudes toward dishonest behavior by means of direct questions such as “Do you think it is stealing to take small items home from work?” or by inquiries about the applicant’s views on tardiness and absenteeism. Others use an indirect approach, measuring personality traits from which psychologists infer the applicant’s attitude toward honesty. Such tests ask questions like “How often do you blush?”, “How often are you embarrassed?”, and “Do you make your bed?”55
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