Richard Thompson Ford, your article clarifies lots of things. The impression the public got from the Rici case is that the results came from both written and oral exams. It hadn't been made clear that the test was weighed against the real life oral tests. The issue should be not who scores highest on an answering true/false questions but on how reliable they would be in the crisis situations firefighters face every day.

Also it hadn't been made clear that the overwhelmingly white fire fighter union had been demanding such a test and that the city's firefighting dept. has been refusing to hire any black fire fighter solely on account of their "race" as recently as the late seventies....

My own experience with so called objective tests is that if you think too much, you're going to come up with the wrong answer. In a way, the people who do best on this type of test usually have an average knowledge of the field rather than an outstanding one. The trick is to put yourself in the test maker shoes rather than think through the crux of the issue. There have been plenty of scandals regardind the SAT tests. The most successful training/tutoring for it didn't dwell on the matters to be tested but on the psychology of the test makers who were described as mainly English major with C/B- average.

The fact that the person who scored the best on the oral test that actually tested knowledge and "thinking on one's feet" had been overlooked is a scandal.

So...perhaps the candidate that did best on the oral part of the exam should remain an active fireman while the guy who did better on the written test should be promoted to a desk job....

Kati, I guess I am confused by two things you mention in this and your other posts on this topic.

• You write as if you are intimately well-informed on the contents of this test; how individual whites and blacks answered and scored on the New Haven exam; and what other fire departments in other parts of the country use for promotion. Though I can assume you are full of it, what evidence or sources do you have for any of this?
• If testing is just "trick" are you saying whites and Asian are somehow craftier and that blacks are just more honest in their skills and knowledge? Is "thinking on one's feet" the ultimate test of any job? Managerial skills, understanding of codes and laws, and basically factual knowledge is all BS? I mean, I could partly evaluate a surgeon based, say, on his knowledge of the body, but I should merely focus on how he subjectively interviews? Book learning is a scam and a crutch for racist whites and Asians?
  

This sounds like the argument of a life-long test-taking failure....

The promotions are for field commanders, not desk jobs

The evidence in the Ricci trial showed that other FDs have abandoned written tests precisely because of the bias they introduce and gone towards more practicum based testing at independent "testing centers" Its more expensive.

If testing is just "trick" are you saying whites and Asian are somehow craftier and that blacks are just more honest in their skills and knowledge?

No - but there is a large body of literature on how written tests are biased.

Tests aren't particularly good at measuring a lot of things. Often things associated with being a good field commander.

The key difference between the oral and written test is that the written test was blind-graded while the grading of the oral test was racially rigged from the outset by making almost two-thirds of the judges minorities, which is highly unrepresentative of the distribution of senior firefighting leadership expertise.

The whole point of civil service examinations is to eliminate favoritism, which is why the union insisted on a 60% weighting in favor of the blind-graded test over the easily-rigged oral test.

Actually, Briscoe did very badly on the written test in any sense. Although he scored a 92.08 on the oral test, he only scored a 59 on the blind-graded written test, putting him 66th out of the 77 test-takers on that test. He scored 13th out of 19 blacks on the written-exam. Overall, counting both the oral and written exams, Briscoe finished 24th, with five blacks ahead of him. Why is Briscoe more deserving than the five blacks who did better under the rules?

Briscoe had the largest divergence in scores between the two tests of any of the 77 test-takers, implying his high score on the oral part could well be a fluke. Oral tests are more likely to produce unreliable scores because the sample size of questions per hour of testing is smaller due to the lower bandwidth of oral vs. written communication.

The main problem is that groups differ on average by up to one std deviation on measures of cognitive ability.

"The major legal dilemma in selection is that the best overall predictors of job performance, namely, cognitive tests, have the most disparate impact on racial-ethnic minorities. Their considerable disparate impact is not due to any imperfections in the tests. Rather, it is due to the tests' measuring essential skills and abilities that happen not to be distributed equally among groups (Schmidt, 1988). Those differences currently are large enough to cause a major problem. U.S. Department of Education literacy surveys show, for example, that black college graduates, on the average, exhibit the cognitive skill levels of white high school graduates without any college (Kirsch, Jungeblut, & Kolstad, 1993, p. 127)."

<link>

How Briscoe did on the written section is irrellevant. And while the test may have been 'blind graded" that doesn't do anything to preclude bias from the test. That the INTENT of the test was to eliminate favoritism doesn't mean it succeeded

Again, testing centers work better. And that is essentially what Briscoe is demanding be used. Briscoe is simply complying with the letter of the Ricci case. SCOTUS essentially said that NHFD couldn't toss the test until they got sued. And Briscoe couldn't sue until he had standing. And that meant waiting until the promotion process got restarted.

I predicted this would happen when Ricci was handed down. It was a poorly decided case that is a quintessential example of judicial activism/

"I predicted this would happen when Ricci was handed down. It was a poorly decided case that is a quintessential example of judicial activism/"

I think conservatives have made their position clear. Judicial activism is wrong.

Unless for the purpose of correcting the judicial activism of a lower court. The election of 2000 made that clear.