Source (the original link is dead, so I dredged it up through archive.org): http://web.archive.org/web/200911140239 ... t_yourself
The underlying idea here is fairly simple: the LSAT, especially when it's the main factor driving law school admissions, defines "ability" in too narrow a context. Schools should have the ability to take into account a "broader array of performance factors." This test, which supposedly identifies 26 competency factors involved with successful lawyering, could be one of those measures. If you've been following the news, you've probably heard of this test, which is being championed by two professors at Berkeley. It all seems fairly reasonable.1) In a neighborhood meeting called to address an urgent problem, I have important ideas to share, but a lot of people are trying to talk at once and nothing much is getting done. Listening to what I consider trivial points being made by others, I find my temper rising. What I would do next is:
a. Get up and make notes on a chart pad about my ideas and others that seem helpful.
b. Keep gradually increasing the volume of my voice until people pay attention to what I have to say.
c. Wait until someone asks my opinion before I talk.
d. Knock sharply on the table and say, "We have to take turns. Would you, Joe, go first?"
e. Start a more productive subconversation with several people sitting close to me.
f. Suggest breaking into small groups so more people can share ideas quickly and then report back to the general group to seek consensus.
2) You learn that a co-worker, Angela, who you helped train for the job, copied some confidential and proprietary information from the company's files. What would you do?
a. Tell Angela what I learned and that she should destroy the information before she gets caught.
b. Anonymously report Angela to management.
c. Report Angela to management and after disciplinary action has been taken, tell Angela that I'm the one that did so.
d. Threaten to report Angela unless she destroys the information.
e. Do nothing.
Well, there are a couple of problems here. For one thing, you might have noticed that the question seem a little patronizing, or even ridiculous. There's a reason for that. If you take a look at the research proposal, Shultz and Zedeck come out and tell you that the whole thing is largely based on two tests developed by a psychometrician named Robert Hogan. Specifically, Hogan’s tests are categorized "Employment Integrity Tests" (EITs), which sprouted up, Little Shop of Horrors-like, in the 1980s, when polygraph tests (!) were made illegal by the -- really -- Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988.
If the purpose of the IQ test is to measure intelligence*, the purpose of the EIT is to measure thoughtcrime. More specifically, it's designed to measure "undesirable" traits with regard to your behavior -- past, present, and future. This is typically couched in the bland, inoffensive language of "dependability" and "conscientiousness," but what it's actually measuring, when you cut through the psychometric jargon, is your ability to conflate the needs of the larger corporation with your own, even though, in reality, they’re diametrically opposed. “Hostility towards authority” reflects particularly poorly on a taker of an EIT test, which means, presumably, that Wal-Mart might find them particularly useful with regard to screening out employees who might try to, say, organize a union (they will fire you for this), or to report violations of safety regulations, abuse of unpaid overtime, etc. This is scary. If you’ve ever applied for a job at a big-box store and had to answer a 25 page questionnaire asking you whether your use of crack cocaine over the course of the previous year could best be described as zero, almost zero, minimal, moderate, or “heavy, but controlled,” then you’ve already experienced firsthand the heady pleasure of the EIT.
Another problem with this test, in addition to it being a terrifying, Orwellian attempt by corporate America to scan your feeble human brain for the slightest glint or glimmer of subversive behavior in an attempt to secure the future for a docile workforce confidently strutting around the workplace to no place in particular with a nightmare Enzyte Bob rictus grin permanently affixed (possibly via corrective hooks, like in that one episode of The Simpsons), is that it’s hard for me how it’s going to be scored on a captive population.
In other words, these tests work reasonably well on 16 year olds applying to sell extended warranties on MacBook Pros for twelve dollars an hour (believe it or not, there are actually people who answer “heavy, but controlled”), or people who offered to take the test as anonymous research participants, but with advance warning, these tests aren’t hard to solve. The literature is out there. In publishing their proposal, they had to tell us what it is, and, as it turns out, it’s really, really easy to grade out perfectly on these kinds of tests with a little preparation. Mostly it involves role-playing as a Mormon. On question number 2, for example, I think any reasonable person is almost certainly going to, in reality, do (e), unless it’s really, really serious (the question doesn’t specify). Apply the Mormon heuristic, though, and the answer is clearly (b) or (c), although (c) probably scores you slightly more points.
Which is another thing. If you managed to get the original page to load, the preface to the sample tests states, charmingly, “The questions do not have right answers -- they are scored based on answers that were selected by lawyers rated as most effective on the particular factor by their peers and supervisors in our study," which is pretty impressive in that, if I’m parsing it right, she managed to directly contradict the first thing she says by means of the thing she said immediately after it. No answers are right, but some of them are less not right than others. Joking aside, what that means in practical terms is that you’re just assigned a score (or possibly a couple scores, based on multiple axes – this isn’t entirely clear) reflecting your lawyering ability, and some answers give you more points than others. Also, I’m not sure what a “chart pad” is. The face of testing in a new century.
*As a brief aside, it might be worthwhile to point out here that Robert Hogan himself managed to stir up a modest amount of controversy by his signing a public letter, published in The Wall Street Journal, in support of the racist, pseudoscientific, altogether delightfully, comprehensively insane 1994 book The Bell Curve which suggested that, among other things, white people naturally performed better on IQ tests than blacks because their race was more intrinsically intelligent, a claim which was systematically (and elegantly) refuted by a number of high-profile scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky, in addition to anybody else who was around at the time and possessed the, erm, intrinsic intelligence of potato salad. Not that that has anything to do with the validity of EITs in general, mind you.
