Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA?
This is definitely not the case in India - most companies that come to an engineering college campus for mass hiring follow this process:
1. Initial screen on grades
2. Written test for for those past the first filter (might be technical, or an "IQ" test)
3. In-person interview
Of course, keeping in mind some of the people that go through this process successfully, the bar is laughably low for all of these. (And of course, mass hiring companies get lazy and re-use questions, so there's quite a thriving industry built around 'question banks' for steps 2 and 3 above.)
Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA?
Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.
This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more.
(This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.)
I've heard from Indian students at my university that grade screening in ridiculous in India, is that true? When applying coop employment here in North America many of them are shocked that so many companies don't have a minimum gpa cutoff and even the companies that require a minimum GPA to consider you have a reasonably bar 3-3.3 at worst. I've heard stories about people needing to get straight As or some ridiculous benchmark like that in India. Sounds like a toxic environment for the student, no wonder there are so few startups coming out of there despite a booming IT industry. What college kid would spend their time on a side project when they are being held to such ridiculously high academic standard.
I had to do an IQ test when applying to a hedge fund in LA: Madison Tyler Holdings / http://www.ewtcareers.com/ . I'm not sure if they'd talked to legal counsel about it, and I've never seen it anywhere else.
Graduates traditionally are trained by employers to be functional employees.
The point of the original article is that few graduates have any skills of use to the employer, making their degrees worthless.
Having interviewed many Indian graduates over the last ten years, I've learned to ignore their CVs and simply talk to them. If they seem bright and keen to learn they can be useful, but they're only considered because they're cheap.
The difficulty I have found interviewing people who have been through the mainstream Indian educational system is they say "yes" to everything.
Me: Have you used technology X?
Them: Yes
Me: Tell me how you used it
Them: I used it every day
Me: What did you use it for?
Them: I used technology X every day to do my job. It is a very good technology.
This goes on for a bit, and I can see them getting flustered, and they almost seem to resent me, as if I'm deliberately and maliciously trying to humiliate them by asking a question "that's not on the test". Whereas "no, but I used technology Y" would be a perfectly acceptable answer.
Few graduates have any skills at all, outside homework and testtaking. True all over the world.
Skills are acquired during the 1st year at the job. The credential still is meaningful - how much spadework is there to training an educated subject vs one with no vocabulary, no facility with theory, no proven ability to learn?
So yes, hire a successful college grad over, say, a tongue-tied inexperienced person without a degree.
Genuine question: would anything legally prevent an employer from giving an IQ test as part of the hiring process if they wanted to? The standard interview techniques often discussed on HN don't seem very far from that anyway.
Probably not but possibly. IANAL though and I think the HN questions are more about the technology rather than characterizing the innate "intelligence" of an applicant(if it can even be actually measured). I could see there being litigation from a minority group or a different culture saying that the standard IQ test as being racially biased towards white American people; thus, the test would fall under the civil rights act of 1964. There are also cultural differences that minimize the effectiveness of an IQ test being useful across cultural boundaries.
But really, why would you even want to use the result of a very flawed test that really does not show the true level of intelligence to hire someone? Assuming that the IQ test was perfect, intelligence is not the be all end all to performance at a company. Why not instead interview the candidates using performance tests in the specific areas that you are interested in?
would anything legally prevent an employer from giving an IQ test as part of the hiring process if they wanted to?
Threat of litigation prevents companies from doing a lot of things that they might otherwise do. In many cases, it is the most thriving and most desirable companies to applicants that can hire lawyers enough to be advised to be cautious and not take chances with the law.
I thought the reason for keeping graduating colleges as a recruitment criterion was because large organizations just don't have the time to wade through thousands of applications. The HR departments can't really tell the difference between someone who can is super creative and someone who can just get the job done. They look at CV, referrals, past experience.
Though I agree that creativity cannot be attributed to ivy-league alone. Reminds me how Howard Roark got hired by Henry Cameron in the book Fountainhead. Inspite of being a dropout, Cameron hires him based on Roark's design work.
Current education system were primarily designed during the industrial revolution. Focus was to give people enough training so that they can operate the machines. Though US education system has changed quite a bit, most other countries (for example, India..) are lagging far behind. Hopefully, this will change soon.
The other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411695) on HN took a turn for the angry and the personal so I will put my thoughts here. Though there will be few personal bits here as well.
It is ok to be dissatisfied with the education one received in India (and blame your parents for making poor choices while you are at it). But for the complaints to be understood by a non-indian I thing some perspective is in order. I cannot even broach open all that needs to be said to even set the groundwork for a wholesome discussion. So I will stick to few select quirks that are quite unique to the Indian scene.
The first thing is that size of the population seeking college education is just mind-bogglingly huge. College education is perceived as mandatory. Till before a decade ago college education was thought to be the only, yes only, conceivable route to an honourable livelihood. I am talking about people who live above the basic subsitence levels and living (damn! why do I have this. I start typing phonetically when tired and dont even notice it. Meant leaving of course) out the richest.
On one hand we have this huge demand on the other we have the fact that college education is unbelievable cheap, or was. Things are changing now. It is still mostly cheap. To put things in perspective the entirety of my tuition bills for my undergraduate studies in engineering was $15. Yes that is right $15 for all four years put together. The way this works out is through govt subsidies. Furthermore the subsidies are not evenly distributed. There are a few top tier institutes that get a lot, less so for the second tier, drastically less so for the ones that are lower. I think the idea was to establish a a few key stirling institutes and drive traffic there. Part of the reason they converged on this model was scarcity of resources, financial as well as human and the fact that the govt was doing all the lifting.
But the capacity that these institutes can handle is tiny compared to the demand. Hence intense competiton. The only way to get flow control without increasing capacity was to make the process more and more competitive. And that competiton was not always aligned with the final goal of producing a well rounded and competent student.
Then comes the teachers. Apart from the top tier colleges, a teaching job is mostly an easy free parking spot. You can get by doing absolutely nothing. So it attracts people who want to do nothing, or who could not find other suitable means of employment. The salaries are modest, but given what you have to do to earn it, it was pretty much a handout. A part of it was also to absorb the grad students that were being produced and were not in high demand because of then much slower economy.
What about private colleges you say. They used to have a stigma attached. private colleges were the places you went to when you werent scholastically good enough. How a rich dad would bail out his kid. Well the not so rich too, they would rather go bankrupt than deny a college education to their children. These colleges were mostly a glorified retail shop for degrees. Because of this they would not attract the good teachers. But this is changing slowly as they are throwing unignorable wads of money. But people still perceive it as a fight between honour and money.
Now lets turn to the other thread. It was mentioned there that parents decide what you want to study and it is either medicine or engineering. Yes there are parents who are control freaks, quite a few of them actually but the phenomena is not as nearly as widespread as the other thread would make you believe. But yes there is a huge, huge bias for opting for medicine or engineering. The immediate purpose of education is seen as a means of securing your future rather than for the purpose of edification. Till before a decade ago the security in those professions were head and shoulders above the other. By a huge margin. And even then around 60 to 70% of the graduating engineers would find a job right after graduation. A scenario that is quite drastically different now. So you can imagine how the other "riskier" propositions fared. I too was advised to straddle the options of medicine and engineering and did so. Hated the memorization that went into biology. But now I do not begrudge that at all. I feel I am at an advantage because of it.
But how was the quality of the undergrad education you ask?
Well I went to a institute that was shy of the top tier, and much of my undergrads I was quite wasted anyway. But very early enough I developed deep contempt for many of our teachers and chose to educate myself on my own. I cut classes frequently but would spend time hidden in the library reading something of interest. Way more productive than a lecture that I was sure I would get nothing from. I started of as a mechanical engineer (well manufacturing to be precise) and now am doing machine learning and there was a bit of robotics down the way, and CNC machine programing and programing computational geometry algorithms in between.
The government is aware of the problem and actually is trying to recruit heavily from the US universities. But then again for the top tier colleges.
As another Indian who went through the above myself, I can vouch that srean's description is quite accurate.
The only thing I would like to add is w.r.t. to the teachers - apart from the IITs (and a few other select colleges), most of the teachers there are pretty pathetic, and I think the biggest reason is that the well-qualified people choose to rather work at a private company and earn 5-10x more rather than join a non-IIT college as a teacher. IITs are the exception because there is significant academic prestige to be a professor there, which most other colleges cannot claim.
quite an excellent post.
But very early enough I developed deep contempt for many of our teachers and chose to educate myself on my own.
that would be true for most of us - self taught engineers we are.
Also unlike in the US where there are many universities of top repute, in India we have either the IITs or NITs [wrt engineering] - and actual quality of education their is also isnt great [ well i can say about NITs].
India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality.
The whole country's economy is based on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a pioneer in the field.
The most recent example of this ideology is the "Business Process Outsourcing" industry.
New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable.
This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum.
Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.
I guess, these things sort themselves out in a capitalist society. I guess, there is nothing really to worry about :)
Indian higher educational institutes and their ratings correlate well on a log graph. This is the way it should ideally be (it is a well designed filter). Only problem is that the highest rated institutes are few and far between. The students admitted in these top-tier universities have cleared entrance examinations with a standard deviation of less than 5% (this is a guess, it is likely even less). A lot of potentially good students are therefore left out of an opportunity for better education (rather a better starting job, due to the hiring culture).
It is true that the 'education' in India sucks - it is outdated, and often not worth the 4 years spent in acquiring it. However, the log correlation ensures that top-tier universities are damn hard to get into, and those few than do get into them (for example, the IITs) are by far the best in the world (compared to anywhere).
Given some more economic pressure, more top-tier universities should popup soon. As for finding customer service workforce, I think, its about time India starts offshoring it elsewhere ;)
"So knowing that a college is rigorous in its admission standards is a way to signal prospective employers that the graduates from that college are already vetted."
I would say that the admission standards here in India are very rigid , going by the top two engineering entrance exams. For IITs 4k out of 150k people who write the exam get admissions whereas for the RECS and some second tier colleges the admission rate was around 15-20%. Hence i think the problem is not that the admission standards are lax.
What the wsj article was hinting at a lack of basic comprehension and technical skills. Lack of comprehension skills(in English) can be explained by the fact that English is not the first language ,even though it may be the medium of instruction.
The other weakness has a lot to do with lack of interest, motivation and also a sense of lethargy which sets in after going through two years of what can best be described as a bootcamp preparing for the engineering entrance exams.
"Ultimately, an impressive college credential from a good college serves to a prospective employer as an extended IQ test, a sort of legal signaling device."
I know this community likes to hate on non-technical college degrees, but the sort of thinking treats "real" liberal arts degrees quite unfairly. Believe it or not, but broad, challenging programs produce a substantial change in the willing student. Like it is often said, the technical knowledge is often better obtained on the job.
Is there a cultural issue here? Perhaps the employers are looking for forthright people, while (the limited number of) young Indian grads I've met are usually soft-spoken and more circumspect. Could this be the issue.
I find what zwischenzug said to be true, that most graduates are trained by their employers, not by the universities.
Looking back at myself - how I was when I graduated vs. with experience of ~10 years in the industry - I think it is more of an issue of exposure to the right things than culture.
Besides what I find is a total disconnect of industry reality in college education. The only way we could circle back to correct this is by having experienced people from industry going back to academic roots to teach, to improve quality of experience graduates go through.
With my current employer to bridge the gap & provide more exposure to students & guide them, we go to colleges & schools across rural areas and we conduct a program in partnership with "Junior Achiever" (http://ja.org/).
We hope such programs would eventually bridge the gap between industry & academia and also help students get the right exposure.
what i have from my own experience is every one treats technical courses like a mathematical function.
Go through course Y and you will be more smarter than people from course X.I always keep hearing stuff like "Brigding the gap between industry and acedemia" which i never seem to understand. Trying to do something other then mentioned in your ciricullum is considered taboo. Most of my friends have "outsourced" thier final semester academic projects to a institute which prepares it for them. Dont trust me? have a look at this http://goaltechnologies.in/new/?page_id=13
[+] [-] shrikant|15 years ago|reply
This is definitely not the case in India - most companies that come to an engineering college campus for mass hiring follow this process:
1. Initial screen on grades 2. Written test for for those past the first filter (might be technical, or an "IQ" test) 3. In-person interview
Of course, keeping in mind some of the people that go through this process successfully, the bar is laughably low for all of these. (And of course, mass hiring companies get lazy and re-use questions, so there's quite a thriving industry built around 'question banks' for steps 2 and 3 above.)
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.
This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more.
(This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.)
[+] [-] reedF211|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jplewicke|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwischenzug|15 years ago|reply
The point of the original article is that few graduates have any skills of use to the employer, making their degrees worthless.
Having interviewed many Indian graduates over the last ten years, I've learned to ignore their CVs and simply talk to them. If they seem bright and keen to learn they can be useful, but they're only considered because they're cheap.
[+] [-] gaius|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|15 years ago|reply
Skills are acquired during the 1st year at the job. The credential still is meaningful - how much spadework is there to training an educated subject vs one with no vocabulary, no facility with theory, no proven ability to learn?
So yes, hire a successful college grad over, say, a tongue-tied inexperienced person without a degree.
[+] [-] tomstuart|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weaksauce|15 years ago|reply
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_bias
But really, why would you even want to use the result of a very flawed test that really does not show the true level of intelligence to hire someone? Assuming that the IQ test was perfect, intelligence is not the be all end all to performance at a company. Why not instead interview the candidates using performance tests in the specific areas that you are interested in?
[+] [-] parfe|15 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/weekinreview/ideas-trends-...
It sure is legal, but not in the direction you'd expect.
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
Threat of litigation prevents companies from doing a lot of things that they might otherwise do. In many cases, it is the most thriving and most desirable companies to applicants that can hire lawyers enough to be advised to be cautious and not take chances with the law.
[+] [-] wicknicks|15 years ago|reply
Though I agree that creativity cannot be attributed to ivy-league alone. Reminds me how Howard Roark got hired by Henry Cameron in the book Fountainhead. Inspite of being a dropout, Cameron hires him based on Roark's design work.
Current education system were primarily designed during the industrial revolution. Focus was to give people enough training so that they can operate the machines. Though US education system has changed quite a bit, most other countries (for example, India..) are lagging far behind. Hopefully, this will change soon.
[+] [-] srean|15 years ago|reply
It is ok to be dissatisfied with the education one received in India (and blame your parents for making poor choices while you are at it). But for the complaints to be understood by a non-indian I thing some perspective is in order. I cannot even broach open all that needs to be said to even set the groundwork for a wholesome discussion. So I will stick to few select quirks that are quite unique to the Indian scene.
The first thing is that size of the population seeking college education is just mind-bogglingly huge. College education is perceived as mandatory. Till before a decade ago college education was thought to be the only, yes only, conceivable route to an honourable livelihood. I am talking about people who live above the basic subsitence levels and living (damn! why do I have this. I start typing phonetically when tired and dont even notice it. Meant leaving of course) out the richest.
On one hand we have this huge demand on the other we have the fact that college education is unbelievable cheap, or was. Things are changing now. It is still mostly cheap. To put things in perspective the entirety of my tuition bills for my undergraduate studies in engineering was $15. Yes that is right $15 for all four years put together. The way this works out is through govt subsidies. Furthermore the subsidies are not evenly distributed. There are a few top tier institutes that get a lot, less so for the second tier, drastically less so for the ones that are lower. I think the idea was to establish a a few key stirling institutes and drive traffic there. Part of the reason they converged on this model was scarcity of resources, financial as well as human and the fact that the govt was doing all the lifting.
But the capacity that these institutes can handle is tiny compared to the demand. Hence intense competiton. The only way to get flow control without increasing capacity was to make the process more and more competitive. And that competiton was not always aligned with the final goal of producing a well rounded and competent student.
Then comes the teachers. Apart from the top tier colleges, a teaching job is mostly an easy free parking spot. You can get by doing absolutely nothing. So it attracts people who want to do nothing, or who could not find other suitable means of employment. The salaries are modest, but given what you have to do to earn it, it was pretty much a handout. A part of it was also to absorb the grad students that were being produced and were not in high demand because of then much slower economy.
What about private colleges you say. They used to have a stigma attached. private colleges were the places you went to when you werent scholastically good enough. How a rich dad would bail out his kid. Well the not so rich too, they would rather go bankrupt than deny a college education to their children. These colleges were mostly a glorified retail shop for degrees. Because of this they would not attract the good teachers. But this is changing slowly as they are throwing unignorable wads of money. But people still perceive it as a fight between honour and money.
Now lets turn to the other thread. It was mentioned there that parents decide what you want to study and it is either medicine or engineering. Yes there are parents who are control freaks, quite a few of them actually but the phenomena is not as nearly as widespread as the other thread would make you believe. But yes there is a huge, huge bias for opting for medicine or engineering. The immediate purpose of education is seen as a means of securing your future rather than for the purpose of edification. Till before a decade ago the security in those professions were head and shoulders above the other. By a huge margin. And even then around 60 to 70% of the graduating engineers would find a job right after graduation. A scenario that is quite drastically different now. So you can imagine how the other "riskier" propositions fared. I too was advised to straddle the options of medicine and engineering and did so. Hated the memorization that went into biology. But now I do not begrudge that at all. I feel I am at an advantage because of it.
But how was the quality of the undergrad education you ask? Well I went to a institute that was shy of the top tier, and much of my undergrads I was quite wasted anyway. But very early enough I developed deep contempt for many of our teachers and chose to educate myself on my own. I cut classes frequently but would spend time hidden in the library reading something of interest. Way more productive than a lecture that I was sure I would get nothing from. I started of as a mechanical engineer (well manufacturing to be precise) and now am doing machine learning and there was a bit of robotics down the way, and CNC machine programing and programing computational geometry algorithms in between.
The government is aware of the problem and actually is trying to recruit heavily from the US universities. But then again for the top tier colleges.
[+] [-] tsycho|15 years ago|reply
The only thing I would like to add is w.r.t. to the teachers - apart from the IITs (and a few other select colleges), most of the teachers there are pretty pathetic, and I think the biggest reason is that the well-qualified people choose to rather work at a private company and earn 5-10x more rather than join a non-IIT college as a teacher. IITs are the exception because there is significant academic prestige to be a professor there, which most other colleges cannot claim.
[+] [-] sdave|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|15 years ago|reply
New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable. This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum.
Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.
[+] [-] tathagata|15 years ago|reply
Indian higher educational institutes and their ratings correlate well on a log graph. This is the way it should ideally be (it is a well designed filter). Only problem is that the highest rated institutes are few and far between. The students admitted in these top-tier universities have cleared entrance examinations with a standard deviation of less than 5% (this is a guess, it is likely even less). A lot of potentially good students are therefore left out of an opportunity for better education (rather a better starting job, due to the hiring culture).
It is true that the 'education' in India sucks - it is outdated, and often not worth the 4 years spent in acquiring it. However, the log correlation ensures that top-tier universities are damn hard to get into, and those few than do get into them (for example, the IITs) are by far the best in the world (compared to anywhere).
Given some more economic pressure, more top-tier universities should popup soon. As for finding customer service workforce, I think, its about time India starts offshoring it elsewhere ;)
[+] [-] jkuria|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sid6376|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fecklessyouth|15 years ago|reply
I know this community likes to hate on non-technical college degrees, but the sort of thinking treats "real" liberal arts degrees quite unfairly. Believe it or not, but broad, challenging programs produce a substantial change in the willing student. Like it is often said, the technical knowledge is often better obtained on the job.
[+] [-] teyc|15 years ago|reply
Is there a cultural issue here? Perhaps the employers are looking for forthright people, while (the limited number of) young Indian grads I've met are usually soft-spoken and more circumspect. Could this be the issue.
I find what zwischenzug said to be true, that most graduates are trained by their employers, not by the universities.
[+] [-] happyfeet|15 years ago|reply
Besides what I find is a total disconnect of industry reality in college education. The only way we could circle back to correct this is by having experienced people from industry going back to academic roots to teach, to improve quality of experience graduates go through.
With my current employer to bridge the gap & provide more exposure to students & guide them, we go to colleges & schools across rural areas and we conduct a program in partnership with "Junior Achiever" (http://ja.org/).
We hope such programs would eventually bridge the gap between industry & academia and also help students get the right exposure.
[+] [-] copper|15 years ago|reply
There is, but it's probably the same point that's been made over and over in the submission of the WSJ article to HN.
FWIW, what Sridhar says in his article is exactly what zwischenzug said too :)
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djd|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raymondhome|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] known|15 years ago|reply
But IITs focus only on IQ and IIMs on EQ.