Really? Which courts? Which states?
My understanding is that blanket IQ tests cannot be used by any employer except the military, precisely because the military has a blanket exemption from more or less all anti-discrimination laws.
What are permitted are aptitude tests -- but they must be individually calibrated to the tasks of the individual employer and job.
A "valid answer"? Your questions are based on an incorrect presupposition of the facts.
See, this is what bothers me. I may be reading the tone wrong, but you come across as smug and well read, yet what you say demonstrates profound ignorance of the issues. It's like asking how come there's still monkeys if'n we evolved from them.
Why I always participate in these IQ threads-- I don't care if people think the IQ test is the best thing since sliced bread, or sleep with a copy of mismeasure under their pillows, I'd just hope as skeptics they'd base their opinion on the readilly available literature (100 years worth!) on the topic.
I've never seen an area where skeptics so often drop the ball.
Shoenfelt & Pedigo (2005). A review of court decisions on cognitive ability testing, 1992-2004. Review of Public Personnel Administration.
"In sum, cognitive abilities have great potential for utility in the selection process and are likely the best predictors of job performance across a wide range of occupational settings. However, cognitive ability testing is likely to result in race-based adverse impact. The current review suggests that organizations that use professionally developed standardized cognitive ability tests that are validated are likely to fare well in court".
From
www.wonderlic.com. (the wonderlic is a g loaded "blanket" IQ test-- it was the one used in griggs v. duke power in 1971, and has since been vindicated by psychometricians doing presumably junk science):
Since 1937, more than 120 million people at thousands of organizations worldwide have taken the WPT.
That's a lot of people taking the test! Surely the courts would be worried were it lacking in validity, especially since it indeed creates adverse impact.
Here's an interesting quote-- Remington college switched to using the wonderlic to avoid legal issues, as the test's validity seems unrivaled!
"Remington College made the transition to using the Wonderlic SLE as part of its admissions criteria for all of its campuses three years ago. Based in Little Rock, Ark., Remington College has more than 20 locations nationwide offering training for medical, technology, criminal justice, and other careers. Remington had already been using the Wonderlic Personnel Test as a corporate hiring tool, and its academic version – the SLE – as a selection assessment for students in states where testing is mandatory. But as the school grew, the need for stricter admissions standards increased, so the test was implemented at every campus as a mandatory criterion for acceptance.
"We started using the Wonderlic as an assessment at all the schools for several reasons," says Mike Lanouette. Chief Academic Officer. The primary reasons were: to avoid the legal issues that can results from the perception of bias when different criteria for acceptance are used at different campuses, and to ensure that every student had the ability to succeed in their programs. "The SLE is an easy way to identify whether people have a good chance of doing well in our programs, and it helps us identify students with a high probability for academic issues that might require additional help."
Unlike admissions tests that measure students' English and math skills, the Wonderlic test measures cognitive ability, which is the single strongest predictor of academic success as well as ultimate job success, Long notes. "English and math tests tell you what students have already learned. A cognitive test tells you what they are capable of learning. That's the true indicator of ability."
