Comment by Manuel_D
2 months ago
> As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:
> “I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2
> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through.
From the first article on The scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
> After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released, Snow took it a step further. As Fox Business reported (related in Rojas v. FAA), he sent voice-mail messages to NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was "about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question."
You can take the bigraphical questionnaire and see the question weightings here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that this was just "buzzwords".
I've read it. I've seen all the weightings. My point is that after reading the IG report, I think it's most likely that when he made the following statement he was exaggerating and claiming that he knew the right answers when he didn't:
> I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase
What do you think the point of such a questionnaire was?
Why would you want to filter for applicants who report that their worst high school subject was science and their lowest college grades were in history?
As to why the questionnaire exists - It's the equivalent of something that's very common in the private sector. A company gets thousands of applicants for a job. They only have the resources to interview some small percentage of that. So they develop a very rough filter to narrow down the pool to something manageable. For instance, if it's an entry level job they'll typically just categorically reject anyone who has an advanced degree or more than a few years of work experience because they figure that person will leave for a better job as soon as they can.
That's what the questionnaire was designed to do. The other steps in the hiring process take a lot of time and resources (proctored exam, referrals, medical testing) so they wanted to put a rough filter in front of that to reduce the numbers to something manageable.
As to why they would give a higher weight if you said your worst high school subject was science - that's the part that I think was just an overfit model producing nonsensical results. That kind of statistically-significant-but-nonsensical parameter is exactly what Freedman's Paradox describes.
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Do you have the list of answers Snow told candidates to pick? It'd be simple to cross reference those with the biographical questionnaire weightings?
To my knowledge that was not recorded anywhere. However there are interviews with participants on the call: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG...
One of the reasons why I think he was bullshitting was that according to the testimony, he said to answer the question about how many sports you played in high school honestly, but that wast the wrong information because that one of the questions where some answers would give you more points than others. The other reason is that it's just painfully obvious from the testimony that this guy was not reliable - he took a generic resume writing guide that he had been given years ago and passed it off as inside information.
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