7 ms·

Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA? This is definitely not the case in India - most companies that come to an engineering c

Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA? This is definitely not the case in India - most companies that come to an engineering college campus for mass hiring follow this process: 1. Initial screen on grades 2. Written test for for those past the first filter (might be technical, or an "IQ" test) 3. In-person interview Of course, keeping in mind some of the people that go through this process successfully, the bar is laughably low for all of these. (And of course, mass hiring companies get lazy and re-use questions, so there's quite a thriving industry built around 'question banks' for steps 2 and 3 above.)

patio11 16y ago
Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA? Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws. This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more. (This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.)
- tomjen3 16y ago
  >Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?
  - jbm 16y ago
    At the risk of replying seriously to a flippant comment, it is a stretch to say that the IQ test is a rock solid method to identify intelligence. It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly on IQ tests as opposed to other groups. I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?
    - tomjen3 16y ago
      I don't find that information actionable, I was more interested in how they made that politically correct.
      - ErrantX 16y ago
        Patricks summary was just the basics of the case. The background is that Duke Power originally segregated employees, only employing African-Americans in the labor sector. Then the civil rights laws came in and they introduced requirements, including an IQ test, that didn't violate the laws, but had the same effect. ''Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?'' Simple answer is no, they didn't. The court basically found that because African-Americans had suffered a lower standard of education (their wording: ''Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences in Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969)'') and that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. (it's an interesting case) Whether that would be the same now, I don't know. On the other hand I could completely believe that companies are still worried by it, and so avoid IQ tests etc.
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
        gjm11 16y ago
        > The court basically found [...] that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation. The court didn't actually find quite that. From the judgement: The Court of Appeals held that the Company had adopted the diploma and test requirements without any "intention to discriminate against Negro employees." 420 F.2d at 1232. We do not suggest that either the District Court or the Court of Appeals erred in examining the employer's intent; [...] Incidentally, your WP URL didn't work for me, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co does. (And yet it then displays the title with "v." rather than "v", saying it's redirected. I don't know quite what's going on there.)
  - rmc 16y ago
    I would suspect the court found that the particular form of IQ test used was biased against poorer people, or would be biased agaist people from certain cultures.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    No, what the Supreme Court found in that case at that time is that employment test, in the newly desegregating south, had not been shown to have relevance to occupational requirements. The Court did leave open the possibility that a test that was of the nature of an IQ test could be used for hiring, but only if the company hiring showed rigorously a relationship to job requirements. If that is shown, the disparate impact in something that is a bona-fide occupational qualification wouldn't matter. "Disparate impact" reasoning in equal protection cases has a long history, by the way. One of the earliest cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553011&q=yick+wo+v+hopkins&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553... held that a local law that regulated laundries in San Francisco violated the federal Constitution because most of the laundry businesses banned by the law were owned by Chinese immigrants, while most laundries that fit the law's requirements were owned by people of "white" backgrounds. (Knowing the time and place of this case, it's rather plain that the law was designed to discriminate in that manner.) Context matters. But some of the comments above are true, that today many companies use school credentials as proxies for intelligence, and give higher education institutions a lot of incentive to operate as diploma mills. But there ARE companies in the United States that use various tests (the Wonderlic test is one example) that are essentially IQ tests as part of the hiring process. The current claim in the mainstream literature on hiring procedures is that the two most effective screening procedures for job applicants are 1) work-sample tests or 2) IQ-like tests (these two are tied for first place), with all other procedures such as personal interviews, resume reviews, diploma requirements, personal references, etc., etc. ranking lower in practical usefulness. IQ-like tests are also quite inexpensive (in the form such as the Wonderlic test) and thus fare well for organizations that use them. That is the current claim in the literature, across a broad array of occupations in a broad array of industries. After edit: Here's a link to a reasonably good, current bibliography on IQ-testing issues, including some of the issues about legal requirements and trade-offs in efficacy of different ways to rate applicants for jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
  - StuffMaster 16y ago
    People used to believe that, yes, based on IQ tests which measured "innate" intelligence. We now know that IQ problem-solving abilities are influenced by one's childhood development.
- rdl 16y ago
  The weird thing is that there was a case in New Hampshire a few years ago where firefighters had a test, and the city threw out the results of the test in making hiring decisions because...they thought the test would be unfairly biased against minorities. The Supreme Court heard this case and ruled that the test should have been applied, which at least to me seems to be the opposite of the Griggs case.
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    If you could show that passing the test was an important part of performing in the job (i.e. those that did not pass the test would be worse, or unable to perform the job) then it would pass the Griggs finding. The main issue with Griggs was that the court found that people who failed the test were no worse (at their job) than those that passed it. And, so, decided (rightly) that the test was not there for performance/ability reasons, but for other reasons.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    That wasn't an IQ test. It was a direct test of firefighting knowledge. While the test was never released to the public, a couple of questions were. They were mostly stuff like: "You are entering a burning factory which appears to be made primarily out of concrete. What sort of saw blade do you attach to your buzzsaws? a) Steel b) diamond coated steel c)..." The court ruled that the test results should have been applied simply because the de-facto procedure of: 1) Promote people based on a test, BUT 2) If black people don't do well, ignore the test. was racist in favor of blacks. (Another question famously related to NYC geography, since the test was lazily copied from NYC.)
    - sethg 16y ago
      If I recall correctly, the fire department in question was afraid that if it promoted strictly based on the test, then at least one black firefighter who hadn’t been promoted would sue, and the department didn’t want to defend the test in court. So they tried to dodge the problem by bailing on the test, and then got sued from the other direction.
reedF211 16y ago
I've heard from Indian students at my university that grade screening in ridiculous in India, is that true? When applying coop employment here in North America many of them are shocked that so many companies don't have a minimum gpa cutoff and even the companies that require a minimum GPA to consider you have a reasonably bar 3-3.3 at worst. I've heard stories about people needing to get straight As or some ridiculous benchmark like that in India. Sounds like a toxic environment for the student, no wonder there are so few startups coming out of there despite a booming IT industry. What college kid would spend their time on a side project when they are being held to such ridiculously high academic standard.
- intended 16y ago
  Yes it is. Effectively for an undergrad 2 things matter - Your grades and your pedigree (IIT, Engineering students are the most valuable, and this combines with the reputation of institution. Commerce students are next in line, and arts students last.) Basically these are proxies for ability discovery. Its pretty brutal.
- sid6376 16y ago
  Yes this is applied by some companies in India, however the reasoning behind it needs some explanation. Personally in my college there were around 350 CSE and IT students. The top companies(in India) say your Amazon, MS and Google have a lengthy interview procedure and cannot possibly go through this will all the students. So they screen grades.Note that, this happens typically only in the second tier instituions and not the premier institutions which do not have the problem of a huge student strength. For this reason typically students from other majors(electrical,chemical etc.) are also not allowed to sit for programming interviews.
  - eru 16y ago
    I guess one way around this for a student is to contribute to open source---that could get you an interview at those companies.
    - intended 16y ago
jplewicke 16y ago
I had to do an IQ test when applying to a hedge fund in LA: Madison Tyler Holdings / http://www.ewtcareers.com/ http://www.ewtcareers.com/ . I'm not sure if they'd talked to legal counsel about it, and I've never seen it anywhere else.

patio11 16y ago

Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA? Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws. This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more. (This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.)

tomjen3 16y ago
>Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?
- jbm 16y ago
  At the risk of replying seriously to a flippant comment, it is a stretch to say that the IQ test is a rock solid method to identify intelligence. It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly on IQ tests as opposed to other groups. I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    I don't find that information actionable, I was more interested in how they made that politically correct.
    - ErrantX 16y ago
      Patricks summary was just the basics of the case. The background is that Duke Power originally segregated employees, only employing African-Americans in the labor sector. Then the civil rights laws came in and they introduced requirements, including an IQ test, that didn't violate the laws, but had the same effect. ''Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?'' Simple answer is no, they didn't. The court basically found that because African-Americans had suffered a lower standard of education (their wording: ''Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences in Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969)'') and that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. (it's an interesting case) Whether that would be the same now, I don't know. On the other hand I could completely believe that companies are still worried by it, and so avoid IQ tests etc.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - gjm11 16y ago
        > The court basically found [...] that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation. The court didn't actually find quite that. From the judgement: The Court of Appeals held that the Company had adopted the diploma and test requirements without any "intention to discriminate against Negro employees." 420 F.2d at 1232. We do not suggest that either the District Court or the Court of Appeals erred in examining the employer's intent; [...] Incidentally, your WP URL didn't work for me, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co does. (And yet it then displays the title with "v." rather than "v", saying it's redirected. I don't know quite what's going on there.)
- rmc 16y ago
  I would suspect the court found that the particular form of IQ test used was biased against poorer people, or would be biased agaist people from certain cultures.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  No, what the Supreme Court found in that case at that time is that employment test, in the newly desegregating south, had not been shown to have relevance to occupational requirements. The Court did leave open the possibility that a test that was of the nature of an IQ test could be used for hiring, but only if the company hiring showed rigorously a relationship to job requirements. If that is shown, the disparate impact in something that is a bona-fide occupational qualification wouldn't matter. "Disparate impact" reasoning in equal protection cases has a long history, by the way. One of the earliest cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553011&q=yick+wo+v+hopkins&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553... held that a local law that regulated laundries in San Francisco violated the federal Constitution because most of the laundry businesses banned by the law were owned by Chinese immigrants, while most laundries that fit the law's requirements were owned by people of "white" backgrounds. (Knowing the time and place of this case, it's rather plain that the law was designed to discriminate in that manner.) Context matters. But some of the comments above are true, that today many companies use school credentials as proxies for intelligence, and give higher education institutions a lot of incentive to operate as diploma mills. But there ARE companies in the United States that use various tests (the Wonderlic test is one example) that are essentially IQ tests as part of the hiring process. The current claim in the mainstream literature on hiring procedures is that the two most effective screening procedures for job applicants are 1) work-sample tests or 2) IQ-like tests (these two are tied for first place), with all other procedures such as personal interviews, resume reviews, diploma requirements, personal references, etc., etc. ranking lower in practical usefulness. IQ-like tests are also quite inexpensive (in the form such as the Wonderlic test) and thus fare well for organizations that use them. That is the current claim in the literature, across a broad array of occupations in a broad array of industries. After edit: Here's a link to a reasonably good, current bibliography on IQ-testing issues, including some of the issues about legal requirements and trade-offs in efficacy of different ways to rate applicants for jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
- StuffMaster 16y ago
  People used to believe that, yes, based on IQ tests which measured "innate" intelligence. We now know that IQ problem-solving abilities are influenced by one's childhood development.
rdl 16y ago
The weird thing is that there was a case in New Hampshire a few years ago where firefighters had a test, and the city threw out the results of the test in making hiring decisions because...they thought the test would be unfairly biased against minorities. The Supreme Court heard this case and ruled that the test should have been applied, which at least to me seems to be the opposite of the Griggs case.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  If you could show that passing the test was an important part of performing in the job (i.e. those that did not pass the test would be worse, or unable to perform the job) then it would pass the Griggs finding. The main issue with Griggs was that the court found that people who failed the test were no worse (at their job) than those that passed it. And, so, decided (rightly) that the test was not there for performance/ability reasons, but for other reasons.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  That wasn't an IQ test. It was a direct test of firefighting knowledge. While the test was never released to the public, a couple of questions were. They were mostly stuff like: "You are entering a burning factory which appears to be made primarily out of concrete. What sort of saw blade do you attach to your buzzsaws? a) Steel b) diamond coated steel c)..." The court ruled that the test results should have been applied simply because the de-facto procedure of: 1) Promote people based on a test, BUT 2) If black people don't do well, ignore the test. was racist in favor of blacks. (Another question famously related to NYC geography, since the test was lazily copied from NYC.)
  - sethg 16y ago
    If I recall correctly, the fire department in question was afraid that if it promoted strictly based on the test, then at least one black firefighter who hadn’t been promoted would sue, and the department didn’t want to defend the test in court. So they tried to dodge the problem by bailing on the test, and then got sued from the other direction.

reedF211 16y ago

I've heard from Indian students at my university that grade screening in ridiculous in India, is that true? When applying coop employment here in North America many of them are shocked that so many companies don't have a minimum gpa cutoff and even the companies that require a minimum GPA to consider you have a reasonably bar 3-3.3 at worst. I've heard stories about people needing to get straight As or some ridiculous benchmark like that in India. Sounds like a toxic environment for the student, no wonder there are so few startups coming out of there despite a booming IT industry. What college kid would spend their time on a side project when they are being held to such ridiculously high academic standard.

intended 16y ago
Yes it is. Effectively for an undergrad 2 things matter - Your grades and your pedigree (IIT, Engineering students are the most valuable, and this combines with the reputation of institution. Commerce students are next in line, and arts students last.) Basically these are proxies for ability discovery. Its pretty brutal.
sid6376 16y ago
Yes this is applied by some companies in India, however the reasoning behind it needs some explanation. Personally in my college there were around 350 CSE and IT students. The top companies(in India) say your Amazon, MS and Google have a lengthy interview procedure and cannot possibly go through this will all the students. So they screen grades.Note that, this happens typically only in the second tier instituions and not the premier institutions which do not have the problem of a huge student strength. For this reason typically students from other majors(electrical,chemical etc.) are also not allowed to sit for programming interviews.
- eru 16y ago
  I guess one way around this for a student is to contribute to open source---that could get you an interview at those companies.
  - intended 16y ago

jplewicke 16y ago

I had to do an IQ test when applying to a hedge fund in LA: Madison Tyler Holdings / http://www.ewtcareers.com/ http://www.ewtcareers.com/ . I'm not sure if they'd talked to legal counsel about it, and I've never seen it anywhere else.