"However, the courts sided with the lower police department. In its ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the city did not discriminate against Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test. In other words, no one who was deemed “too smart” for the job after taking the intelligence test was hired."

You can apply that logic to race too: "We tested ALL applicants for blackness, not ONLY the black applicants".

You are still sorting people out for something they cannot control...

I definitely had a friend once who was told she had received too high a score for the police job she had applied for. I thought I remember at the time some mention of the rationale being that the police force didn't want people who were too independent-thinking to simply follow orders. Maybe that was just my friend's interpretation though!

meaning that at least according to the test, it requires more intelligence to sell insurance than to solve crimes.)

Police do not solve crimes. Police enforce laws. Detectives solve crimes. I would expect that detectives and police officers would be held to different standards.

Fast-forward 8 or so years to today, where crimes involving mobile devices or computers are the norm. Police departments are recruiting tech-savvy young adults out of high school, then sending them to training on digital forensics and the like. Everything goes well for a couple years until they hit the agency's pay ceiling and move to the private sector. There are plenty of opportunities for smart people in law enforcement today that don't equate to boredom - compensation has more to do with it IMO.

This implies we have a police force that is unable to sense or react to nuance in a situation, and who implement a fast but error prone pattern matching algorithm to identify criminality - which is entirely consistent with their behavior.

I suppose this wouldn't be a problem if we had a justice system that, presumably powered by better brains, could quickly throw out the inevitable false positives this quick and dirty algo produces. But the justice system is so slow, so broken, and prone to pro-police bias that it exists primarily to get as much punishment as possible out of those the unintelligent police have tagged as "criminals". That is, the police are the de facto judge, jury, and executioner, and they wield that power with all the delight that you might imagine someone of low intelligence would experience at being given such power.

(Of course, there is still a way to avoid a false positive if you have a great deal of money, which is probably why there is no great pressure to reform the system. Otherwise you're spending 3 years on Riker's without a trial.)

> The test, which is used by other employers, not just law enforcement, poses questions such as: “In the set of words below, what word is different from the others? A. Beef. B. Mackerel. C. Veal. D. Bacon E. Lamb.”

I hate that kind of question. There are at least two obvious answers:

B. The others are all food that comes from domesticated land mammals. Mackerel as a food comes from a fish. Mackerel is also different because it is both the name of the animal and the name of the meat: mackerel comes from mackerels, whereas beef comes from cows and bulls, as does veal, bacon comes from pigs, and lamb comes from sheep.

D. Bacon is a specific preparation of meat (cured) from specific parts (sides or back) of the pig. The others can be prepared in a variety of ways and can come from more regions of the animal.

I cant see anything wrong with this. It's just smart hiring.

The error is first done when you hire detectives and excutives exclusively from the cop force, because then you start with a bad selection (since beeing a good cop and a good detective is two different things).

Does anyone know how much it costs to have a job applicant do the Wonderlic test?

I have a small side business with a friend that has one employee and we're about to hire another one and have long been curious about using the Wonderlic test.

I heard that both cops and taxi drivers aren't suited for creative and theoretical thinkers. Mainly because it's a lot of waiting. They will get bored and quit.

It looks like the servers are getting brought down by the HN traffic.

undefined

sherlock

Another "advantage" of the inverse cutoff is that it reduces the racial disparity in test-based hiring.

Having independent thought is hard to control in making a force of people. To have a force, an army, a unit of people, they have to respond predicatively to all commands. If you put together a force you must believe without doubt that they will follow your command. Police are selected and conditioned accordingly. The military does this as well, training people to kill, and be killed. In previous engagements having people think twice meant death of themselves or others. You had to condition your units to run out into bullets, one after the other, until you made enough of an advance to kill the enemy or die trying. I don't worry about average intelligence officers, but I do worry about average intelligence commanders, judges, and people in control of these forces. When you join they army they will always place you in the position that most suits your psych test, or will even reject you if needed. How is this different? Don't become a cop, become a detective, become an FBI agent, become a judge, or public defender and volunteer firefighter.