Comment by ramblenode
2 months ago
The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:
> 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. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any points.
The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.
To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.
Is it absurd?
The choices for both were Science, Math, English, History/Social Sciences and Physical Education, plus did not attend college for the second.
Math is highly predictive of ATC performance. English is a key requirement due the communication-heavy role. Physical Education is linked to confidence which is a strong predictor of graduation rates.
That leaves History/Social Sciences and Science as oddballs. If you did poorly in Science or History/Social Sciences in high school, that likely didn't change in college, so you would have gotten at least 15 points by answering it the same way for both questions.
I'm not sure there was an expectation that someone would get them both right. Rather having different answers get 15 points ensures people answering both the same way didn't which likely would make the test a bit too easy to pass.
This test just looks like a big five personality test mixed with some socioeconomic and academic questions.
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