Fairness in Employment Testing: Validity Generalization, Minority Issues, and the General Aptitude Test Battery

By John Hartigan, A. Wigdor. 1989

Declining American competitiveness in world economic markets has renewed interest in employment testing as a way of putting the right workers in the right jobs. A new study of the U.S. Department of Labor's General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) Referral System sheds light on key questions for America's employers: How well does the GATB predict job success? Are there scientific justifications for adjusting minority test scores? Will increased use of the GATB result in substantial increases in productivity? Fairness in Employment Testing evaluates both the validity generalization techniques used to justify the use of the GATB across the spectrum of U.S. jobs and the policy of adjusting test scores to promote equal opportunity.

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing Practical Intelligence in Business School Admissions: A Supplement to the Graduate Management Admissions Test. (2006, background): “…have consistently found mean differences on tests of general cognitive ability and related abilities for different racial/ethnic groups; most notably, blacks tend to score one standard deviation lower than whites on these tests (Hartigan & Wigdor, 1989; Jensen, 1998; Schmidt, 1988; Williams, 2000).”
Skills Mismatch in the Labor Market (2003, methodology): “…real-world skills of minorities and low-scoring individuals and are biased either in their content or in their method of use in employee selection (Hartigan & Wigdor 1989, Jencks 1998, Sticht 1992) and those in education, industrial/organizational psychology, and traditional intelligence…”
Determinants, Detection and Amelioration of Adverse Impact in Personnel Selection Procedures: Issues, Evidence and Lessons Learned (2001, background): “(Hartigan and Wigdor (1989) found a GATB composite of verbal and quantitative ability tests correlated ÿ.”
OUTLIER DETECTION AND TREATMENT IN I/O PSYCHOLOGY: A SURVEY OF RESEARCHER BELIEFS AND AN EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION (2006, methodology): “Second, two composites—GVN (general ability, verbal aptitude, and numerical aptitude) and KFM (motor coordination, finger dexterity, and manual dexterity)—^were selected for examination as they form the major components of current operational use of the GATB (cf. Hartigan & Wigdor, 1989).”