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0 pointstaeric1y ago0 comments

You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications?

The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.

That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar.

There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know.

And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.

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bz_bz_bz1y ago

How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants pass (vs. ~60% previously) not “lowering the bar”?

"One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness) is to correlate test scores with job performance. After reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from .69 to .60..."

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&co...

taericOP1y ago

That was the recruitment pipeline. You still had to pass the hiring one.

This is akin to schools that got rid of testing requirements. Agreed it was a terrible choice that should get reversed. But, to say that standards went down on graduates of the schools, you would look at the scores of graduates from said schools.

And to be clear, the expectation of lowering standards for admits to a school would be a higher dropout rate. More stress on the school and testing protocols. But this is not, itself, evidence that graduates are worse.

kalensh1y ago

It's valuable to note that this paper is from 2006, and states:

"Reweighting was based on data collected from incum- bent ATCSs who took AT-SAT on a research basis; some of these employees achieved overall scores less than 70 (that was one of the reasons for the reweighting effort – a belief that incumbent employees should be able to pass the entry-level selection test)"

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