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Pages 1-16

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From page 1...
... At issue in this report is the use of a federally sponsored employment test, the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) , to match job seekers to requests for job applicants from private- and public-sector employers.
From page 2...
... The Department of Labor sought advice on whether the pivotal role envisioned for the General Aptitude Test Battery is technically justified, whether the anticipated economic benefits are realistic, and what the effects of widespread adoption of the VG-GATB Referral System might be on various constituencies of interest, including veterans, people with handicapping conditions, employers, and job seekers. In seeking answers to these questions, the Committee on the General Aptitude Test Battery organized its work around nine topics, outlined briefly below.
From page 3...
... Employment testing raises the issue in the public arena in a very concrete way: employee selection on the basis of rank-ordered test scores will screen out a large proportion of black and Hispanic candidates and thus expose employers (and the Employment Service) to legal action under the civil rights laws on grounds of discrimination; the use of score adjustments to mitigate these adverse effects on the employment chances of minority job seekers creates vulnerabilities to charges of reverse discrimination.
From page 4...
... We did not find the GATB markedly superior or inferior to other test batteries, such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) , on two dimensions of central importance-predictive validity and test reliability.
From page 5...
... Since these corrections have the effect of substantially increasing the estimated correlations between test scores and ratings of job performance, the committee's estimate of GATB validities is substantially lower than that in the technical reports. Does the GATB Predict Less Well for Minority Job Seekers?
From page 6...
... The size of the supervisor bias has not been determined, but its possible presence counsels caution in accepting supervisor ratings as an equally accurate estimate of job performance for both groups. Are There Scientific Justifications for Adjusting Minority Test Scores?
From page 7...
... (Note that these effects are a function of high and low test scores, not racial or ethnic identity.) In sum, the modest validities of the GATE cause selection errors that weigh more heavily on minority workers than on majority workers.
From page 8...
... We accept the general thesis of validity generalization, that the results of validity studies can be generalized to many jobs not actually studied, but we urge a cautious approach of generalizing validities only to appropriately similar jobs. Furthermore, the policy considerations do not end with a demonstration that the GATB has some predictive power for x numbers of jobs.
From page 9...
... However, were the VG-GATB system the only mode of referral through the Employment Service, the lowest-scor~ng applicants would be consigned to receiving little or no assistance in finding work, when in fact many such applicants could perform satisfactorily on many jobs. If the VG-GATB Referral System did not include the kind of score adjustments currently made to the scores of black, Hispanic, and in some cases, Native American applicants, it would have a severe adverse impact on the employment opportunities of members of those demographic groups.
From page 10...
... For example, during the course of site visits to local Job Service offices, we learned that there are some communities that are extremely resistant to testing; one pilot test of the VG-GATB was discontinued because people in the area refused to use the Job Service if they had to take a test. Exclusive use of test-based referral would serve the interests of neither employers nor job seekers in such communities.
From page 11...
... Referral Methods 4. The committee recommends the continued use of score adjustments for black and Hispanic applicants in choosing which Employment Service registrants to refer to an employer, because the effects of imperfect prediction fall more heavily on minority applicants as a group due to their lower mean test scores.
From page 12...
... Given the modest validities of the GATE for the 500 jobs actually studied, given our incomplete knowledge about the relationship between this sample and the remaining 1 1,500 jobs in the U.S. economy, given the Department of Justice challenge to the legality of within-group scoring and the larger philosophical debates about race-conscious mechanisms and the known problems of using a test with severe adverse impact, and given the primitive state of knowledge about the relationship of individual
From page 13...
... 9. Given the primitive state of knowledge about the aggregate economic effects of better personnel selection, we recommend that Employment Service officials refrain from making any dollar estimates of the gains that would result from test-based selection.
From page 14...
... States should consider placing state rehabilitation counselors in local employment service offices that serve a sizable population of handicapped people.
From page 15...
... Chapter 2 focuses on the divergent conceptions of equity that have emerged as a product of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s; it also traces the ambivalence present in American society, as it is reflected in government policy and law. Chapter 3 is an overview of the operations of the U.S.


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