Comment by apical_dendrite
3 months ago
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.
> 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.
You just completely made this up. There isn't even evidence that a "model" exists or was fitted to.
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.
> he said to answer the question about how many sports you played in high school honestly, but that was one of the questions where some answers would give you more points than others.
That's exactly what is alleged: Snow told applicants which answers were worth the most points. This is what Snow himself claimed, too.
And the FAA's internal investigation did have witnesses say that they were instructed on how to respond to the Biographical Assessment:
> One witness said during the call, participants told they were looking at questions on the BA test but did not know what to enter on the test. According to this witness, [redacted] responded with information that should be entered on the BA test.
If the voicemails are recorded anywhere, that will put this question to rest.
2 replies →