I've been pondering this one for a while - it might help get at the discomfort that I think a lot of people feel about tests in this context.

Is it possible for a group of 'experts' to devise tests for some arbitrary position which are at once dircriminating against people who do not have the requisite skills but which are not inherently racially biased?

Or, is it simply that bias only shows up after a test has been administered and we see the results?

I think is what many people worry about is that if there turns out to be a "racial" distribution of the results of a test, then the test itself is deemed to be the problem. It's a bit like Heisenberg uncertainty - you can't avoid it, and the act of measuring precisely makes it shift its nature and crop up somewhere else... consequently, the accusation of racism is always there as a backup when things start to go astray, and we never get to the objective facts of a situation.

If the tests are done correctly, the fact that they deny people without skills to get a job does not make them "discriminatory" as understood by the law. Poor educational systems, for instance, can very well unfairly (on some level) burden certain groups. All the same, they do not have some legal right to jobs that require special technical skills because the tests supplied results in a disproportionate number of other groups getting the jobs.

The experts in question can do various things to make tests less biased. But, it is an imperfect process, and various (often somewhat hidden) biases tend to remain in place. So, the results of the tests provides another means to show bias. Again, disparate results is not proof positive that illegitimate discrimination is present. There are defenses, including bona fide occupational qualifications and clear evidence that no alternative would have done a better job.

But, it's a complex and messy procedure, so either way, racism will be alleged.

-j

To make the tests totally fair, everyone sitting them needs a shared medium of communication.

The trouble with English is that different groups of people speak English in very different ways. They use different parts of the vocabulary, they structure their sentences differently, they have different colloquialisms.

It's the "Call Centre Syndrome". Over here, companies have been forced to close their Indian call centres because of the extreme difficulty British people have communicating effectively with Indian people - even though both are speaking English. Getting your point understood can be a slow and frustrating process that - if it was transformed into a standardised test - would result in one side giving the other side a "fail".

This can be a problem but it is not the only problem. For instance, in the current case, some evidence was submitted that some of the questions were not really relevant to local conditions and/or certain firefighters had certain professional experiences that did not match those that the questions (in no way sine qua non to determine good fire skills) were geared to. Putting aside if this is true, it was not just a language issue per se.

Anyway, you can't make things totally fair in an imperfect world. It is a matter of degree.

-j