[comeonbro]

This involved a completely nonsensical and arbitrary biographical screening test, which:

1. was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently

2. then-current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...

-----

Example questions with the score given for each answer:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...

    15. The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
    A. SCIENCE (+15)
    B. MATH (0)
    C. ENGLISH (0)
    D. HISTORY/SOCIAL SCIENCES (0)
    E. PHYSICAL EDUCATION (0)

    16. Of the following, the college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
    A. SCIENCE (0)
    B. MATH (0)
    C. ENGLISH (0)
    D. HISTORY/POLITICAL SCIENCE (+15)
    E. DID NOT ATTEND COLLEGE (0)

    29. My peers would probably say that having someone criticize my performance (i.e. point out a mistake) bothers me:
    A. MUCH LESS THAN MOST (+8)
    B. SOMEWHAT LESS THAN MOST (+4)
    C. ABOUT THE SAME AS MOST (+8)
    D. SOMEWHAT MORE THAN MOST (0)
    E. MUCH MORE THAN MOST (+10)

[squigz]

Been hearing about this super racist DEI questionnaire for a while now. I cannot believe this is what people have been talking about? These are such normal corpo performance review nonsense.

[titanomachy]

Is this real? Has the person responsible for this been fired yet?

[throwaway48476]

When was the list time you heard of a federal employee getting fired that wasn't the result of a criminal offense? Recent events notwithstanding.

[fads_go]

given that my brother is a senior admin working in human resources at a federal agency, the answer may be much higher than you expect.

It's like any large org. Except it is probably one of the largest large orgs.

And seeing as these orgs need to provide regulated services to 330 million people, the nature of the beast is it must be a large org.

[lazyasciiart]

The first link describes it as one half of a two-step screen where there are known biases in the second step, and there are far more applicants than positions. So the entire point of this quiz is for it to have a deliberate designed complementary bias, so that the outcome of the two tests combined gave a score that was statistically correlated with the desired results and NOT statistically correlated with characteristics they did not find useful.

Is your argument that this is a bad goal to have, or a bad method of approach, or that the quiz created cannot possibly achieve this goal?

[comeonbro]

“We’re going to flip a coin and if it’s heads and you guessed tails then you're fired, but it’s okay because our research shows that people of your racial group are more likely to guess tails and we think there are too many of your kind around”

[lesuorac]

It's not DEI though; it's just standard corruption.

The answer key wasn't provided to _any_ black candidate. It was provided to National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees. Members of that group had an advantage while black candidates not of that group didn't.

corruption is still bad but much like if I stab you it's not a mugging unless I also steal something (both still crimes).

--

Also, are they using an AI image? The woman's head in the bottom left table is like exploded (and DALL-E in the URL)?

https://thenbcfae.com/

https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/1f146012-d119-44df-9fea-5cb...

[lazyasciiart]

Yea - if the end goal of "there are >x qualified applicants, so give me x acceptances where all of them are qualified and the ratio of group1/group2 in acceptances matches the ratio in the applicants" was met, and nobody could see how race came into the test, I don't think anyone would complain. (For instance if they'd waited 20 years and wrapped it in AI, or maybe if they'd just added it as an additional section in the test. It seems that everyone agreed some qualified applicants weren't going to make it through because there were more of them than acceptances.)

My understanding is that people complained a) because it did not meet that goal of all acceptances going to qualified applicants, but I certainly haven't read enough to judge that and b) the rollout sounds like a chain of poor decisions - even just splitting it into two separate result steps was guaranteed to raise ire from people who got rejected at that new first step, which would have been reduced if they'd simply made it an internal factor calculated at the same time as the exam result.

edit: but I take it that your argument is "that's a bad goal to have"

[flir]

You have many qualified applicants. Your hiring process is biased, and lets more green people through than blue people.

Your task is to fix your process so the proportions of green and blue are closer to those of the general population.

How?

You can probably come up with a better design. But I'm not sure that, at core, it would be much different from this.

[FredPret]

> Your task is to fix your process so the proportions of green and blue are closer to those of the general population.

No, your task is to ensure airplanes don’t collide.

[flir]

You already have oodles of qualified applicants.

I guess what you're trying to say is that you don't consider it a problem if the hiring process is biased towards one group.

[viraptor]

This story has really annoying results, because while there were dumb decisions made about the hiring process, people are also blowing some things out of proportion.

There's lots of terrible personality tests in recruitment and they're sometimes abused for various purposes. This one is just mildly bad compared to for example corpos hiring people to analyse the signature/writing style of the candidate. But handing out the key to that test was just terrible.

Then there's another one where people reacted strongly to someone handing out highly scoring words for the resume... where the words would be included in any basic coaching like "leader", "ownership", "delivered", etc.

It's hard to even talk about this when people have kneejerk response to a few key phrases here.

[bityard]

Bad: Writing a nonsensical personality test that ostensibly attempts to select for individuals with a certain background, while actually doing no such thing.

Worse: Making it a pass/no-pass test where if you get any "wrong" answers, you are permanently ejected from the hiring process regardless of education, skill, or in-person interview results.

Egregious: Distributing the answer key by phone to members of a specific DEI action group and telling them to keep quiet about it.

This is not "overblown," it's literally what happened to the FAA hiring process. Some of the most outspoken critics of this scheme are members of that DEI group who were told to cheat on the test, refused to cheat, didn't get the job due to not cheating, and now have little hope of ever landing the job they trained for.

[viraptor]

I didn't say this specific part is overblown, so thanks for agreeing with the main points.