I have a question: Since we have not seen the test, do we know that it ISN’T racially biased? My understanding is simply that the disparity in the test results was what prompted the action to throw out the test. This IS some evidence that the test may be culturally biased, albeit not conclusive. Was there any evidence to show in this case that there was a correlation between test performance and job results? Isn’t that really where the rubber meets the road: IF the tests were not a particlarly good indicator of job perfomrance and IF the test revealed a disparity based on race then that should be enough. However the first half is hard to show, I would think, because by its very nature the test selected only top scorers to move on and a true hypothesis test would have some lower scores allowed to move on.
You have a valid general point–standardized pre-training and licensure exam scores are not a perfect predictor of clinical ability. I don’t disagree with that.
In my experience, which is broad but not perfect or absolute, there is a reasonable correlation between high scores and choice of clinical specialties requiring the ability to grasp very detailed and extensive bodies of material. In simple terms one might say that the “smartest” candidates (the ones with the best academic track records) get into the most demanding subspecialties, publish the best research, and lead their fields. Everyone else is distributed across some spectrum all the way down to the guy who barely made it out of med school, barely passed the USMLE, and ended up in a strip mall clinic in a seedy neighborhood with no hospital privileges anywhere.
While it’s true the last person in the med school class is still called “Doctor” it’s not true that his qualifications and excellence are equivalent to the top person. Since many skillsets are needed to be a good clinician, it is of course true that many wonderful doctors have “craptastic” test scores. The medical profession is such that, if these really good docs are aware of their limitations, they can refer out the difficult problems and manage the less complicated ones themselves–perhaps even better than someone with a good skillset for scores and a lousy skillset for actually relating to patients.
In the medical world, since everyone has the choice to practice independently if they so choose, the closest thing we have to employers are Medical Groups and Hospitals. These often do look at scores–typically the most recent ones, such as USMLE or Board exams–along with the usual other criteria such as recommendations from training programs. Those recommendations will frequently reference prior test scores if they are relevant or outstanding. As a rule of thumb, though, it’s true that an actual Board Certification (this is the exam at the end of specialty training, and several years beyond the basic USMLE) is considered sufficiently difficult to attain that the actual Board score is not usually addressed unless the candidate presents it–and of course that’s only done if it happens to be more on the stellar side.
As to whether or not scores are very predictive of actual ability, it’s kind of difficult to prove because medicine is not easily quantifiable (there are lots of efforts to make it more so). It’s a common impression among me and my colleagues that the lay public has no clue who is a good doctor and who is not…and in many ways the professional-side opinion of that remains within fairly closed ranks.
To give a non-medical analogy though, let me use flying. I fly a lot. I want someone with experience and someone who is highly regarded by his fellow pilots as being superb. My expectation is that all pilots have met a minimum certification exam, but given my druthers I want someone who is highly regarded by colleagues and who aced the exam, even though (so far) all the pilots I’ve had got me to my destination. And I bet the most highly regarded pilots have a long track record of excellence and are not typically the ones who just barely made it through to certification.
Yeah I read that, of course Torre is the firefighter’s lawyer, so who knows. It isn’t necessarily proof that the test wasn’t biased, although that isn’t what the court decided anyway.
No one has answered my question from yesterday. I guess y’all are too interested in debating whether “blacks” are genetically inferior doctors or not. :rolleyes:
Again I ask: what should the City have done instead, given that accepting the test’s results would most certainly have subjected them to a valid Title VII lawsuit?
You aren’t going to answer it because it totally rips the heart out of your thesis. 
The city might get sued accepting the results.
They did get sued not accepting them.
They should have done the right thing: stand by their best efforts to create an equal opportunity. Let the test stand unless there was some sort of absolute evidence it was biased toward a particular group. And that evidence can not simply be the statistical analysis of the outcome; it needs to be why a particular question or process creates a bias.
I got the whole 4/5ths thing, btw. I understand what some people think the law must say. I’ll sit back and let others with more time than I–SCOTUS players, perhaps, explain why that’s either not OK or not the case.
What the city should have done is easy: Create a fair process. Absent evidence the process was unfair, stick to the results.
I’d be perfectly OK, btw, with the City sitting down and saying to the firefighters in advance, “Look guys; we got 37% blacks in our population base. We are going to come up with some sort of process that gets something close to that for our firefighter leadership.”
That’s not what they did.
It doesn’t matter.
Firstly, the programs are designed to help women and blacks in preference to males. That is the stated aim. The people who organise them and the people who participate in them believe they will help blacks and women more than they will help men or whites. Whether they are also available to white men is irrelevant, because they are deliberately designed to preferentially favour blacks and women.
And deliberately, preferentially favouring a group is a close to coddling as makes no difference in this thread.
Secondly the question was whether it was plausible that minorities were coddled throughout their training. I’ve provided evidence that it is not just plausible, but actually occurs.
I have no idea how common it is. Neither do you. I do know that mentors having RAs correct assignments prior to submission is not isolated.
Given that the court’s finding and this whole thread hinges on the fact that they do, either intentionally or unintentionally, that is an incredibly odd claim to make. If schools don’t have policies in place that make it substantially easier for white kids than black kids then we have to conclude that black kids fail in school cause they’re dumb. After all the testing is standardised and the school doesn’t have any policies that make it easier for white kids.
How is it crazy to believe that what the site says the program does is true? The “program will enable [black] residents and students to interact with practicing physicians to gain knowledge about the field of medicine”. It’s right there in black and white: black students have access to practicing physicians that white students do not have.
That may be borderline crazy, but at leats it’s not borderline illiterate, as your position is.
WTF?
If women aren’t expected to perform as well if the study on their own as males are when they study on their own, that is a lower standard.
If women are expected to only be able to equal males with more tutoring than the males get, that is a lower standard and that is coddling.
If women are expected to only perform as well as men if a program is in place to place them with mentor to assist with their study program, that is a lower standard and that is coddling.
If blacks are only expected to equal white performance if they have special programs to give them access to practicing physicians, that is a lower standard and that is coddling.
This is getting ridiculous. These organisations all state quite clearly that in an attempt to allow minorities to equal the academic performance of white males they are provided with special assistance. That is the very definition of having a lowered standards.
I can compete with Lance Armstrong, but only if I am provided with special assistance. Are you seriously arguing that this isn’t setting a lower standard for myself than for Armstrong?
Bloody hell mswas, I bet you never thought we’d be on the same side in a race debate.
Apples and oranges. One has graduated medical school and the other hasn’t. The fair question is, “Given no other information, who would you most trust to know what they’re doing in the operating room? The board-certified surgeon who had to have a higher MCAT score because he’s white or be able to pass with a lower MCAT score because he’s black?”
Not “might” get sued. Most certainly WOULD have been sued. They would have been sued because if they had accepted the results of the test, they would have been violating federal regulations and statutes. :smack:
Now, it may be that the upshot of this case will be that these very rules and regulations in question will be found in need of change, precisely so that the City, and other employers, won’t be put in the position of disadvantaging tested candidates. But until this case came along, the City had no choice about what to do. It didn’t make its decision on the basis of attempting to produce black captains, nor did it make its decision on the basis of attempting to avoid white captains. It made the decision because the federal law it was following said: thou shalt make this decision.
And why did the statutes and regulations say that? Because, despite your consistent refusal to accept this simple fact: there was evidence that the process was unfair. Specifically, it produced disparate results, AND there was testimony supporting the notion that the test was not accurately designed to test what it purported to test.
Shirley producing disparate test results isn’t evidence of unfairness in and of itself, is it? As has been noted, black people really do perform much less well at academic tests across the board. Everywhere from elementary school to Army entrance to Law School. And despite a lot of effort nobody has been able to produce a test that doesn’t produce disparate results.
To me that makes it as certain as we can be about anything that disparate results are not the result of unfair testing. IOW I’m contending that a test can be perfectly fair and still produce disparate results.
Can you give more details?
Are you serious? How many times must this be CAREFULLY EXPLAINED TO YOU GUYS? There have been several cites detailing the law, process, and rationale for the decisions courts made. It has been explained several times that disparate test results alone are not enough to violate federal law, nor is it absolute evidence of unfairness, in and of itself, in the minds of most rational people.
And ironically, those same Black people live and are treated as Black people in elementary school, the army, and law school. I understand this may be a point you disagree with, but there is no need to confuse the issue. Countless studies have should the impact social expectations have on individuals. They demonstrate the trivial (walking and talking more slowly around old people) and the serious (doing poorly on test when primed with negative thoughts). Countless studies have shown the affect poverty, mental and physical heath, environment, and culture have on people. Why are you surprised that people who, on average, are treated worse, go to worse schools, have less money, and less positive reinforcement do less well on tests?
And you needn’t just look at Black people. We can look at the relative success of groups when they move from a negative environment to a positive one to confirm that social and economic forces can act systematically.
And despite a lot of effort, we haven’t been able to rid the world of people who implicitly believe in Black inferiority.
Correct. But the two are not necessarily related.
Once again
More here.
Lastly, here is the New Haven Fire Dept. Study Guide (PDF). I do not beleive this is the study guide provided for the test in question, but it might give some insight to the types of questions being asked.
Calm down dude.
- I came in 3 pages into a 4 page thread. I have seen no such references. I asked a simple question that required a single word answer to bring me up to speed. Thank you for your detailed response, but can the martyr BS, please, and quit implying that I’m stupid.
Where the F*&K did you get that from. I never stated or implied anything remotely like that. Are you just making this shit up on the fly?
And…
Are you attempting to argue that if a test showed that lots of people believed in black inferiority that would evidence the test is flawed? If not then I have no F%*king idea what point your are trying to make with this apparent non sequitur.
Thanks for the rest of the response, but I can do without the attitude. If you think it beneath your dignity to answer a civil question in a civil manner you may want to consider not responding at all.
But you are ignoring the fact that your phrasing accepts many things as predicates that have simply not been proven. You need to demonstrate that those test scores actual translate to competence and ability in the operating room, or in practice.
Without doing that, your scenario is as logical as saying, who do you want operating on you, the doctor who cheats on his wife, or the one who is faithful? Do you want the one who is a scratch golfer, or the guy who got a crazy handicap? I’m sure you can sift through the tea leaves to draw some conclusion based on the facts I gave about who would be a better doctor based on some a logically tenuous correlation, but you would not be making that call based on anything but personal biases.
The same personal biases that lead you to believe that testing, or even past performances (in many circumstances), are predictive of future performance or competence. I think most people make this mistake. They see what seems like a compelling, often strong correlation, and assume there is causation there; or that it will be predictive of future events with a high level of certainty. I find it’s more instructive to look at the counter examples (ie. Ryan Leaf, Harold Miner, Christian Laettner, Li’s Gaussian copula function, silicone breast implants,etc. etc.) to help divorce one’s self from being overconfident in such things.
It’s like when people say Harvard is a great school, when it is more accurate to say great people work and enroll at Harvard. There is nothing special about the buildings or curriculum at Harvard. In fact, if they substituted their incoming class for ASU’s, they would see their ratings drop like a stone. Harvard is only as great school so long as great people want to go to Harvard.
It’s important to make sure you are focus on what is actually being appraised. An high MCAT or USMLE score does not make a good doctor, and a good reputation doesn’t make Harvard. All of those things are surrogates that work so long as the underlying correlation is valid, materially related, and necessary. What we see in the case of the doctors is that it does not seem to be the case with regard to testing and future competence. We assume that higher testing standards will result in better doctors when that doesn’t seem to be the case. Absent further evidence, that does not seem to be the case.
I am calm, but I resent the fact that you can’t be bothered to read 4 pages of this thread, any relevant articles about the case, or the actual court documents before proceeding to post a question that has been asked and answered several times. Honestly, what do you expect when you waste people’s time because you can’t be bothered bring yourself up to speed, or do a simple google search?
What exactly should I infer when I read comments like the following in a thread (and context matters here which is why you should actually read the thread) where it has been suggested repeatedly that Blacks are genetically inferior:
Perhaps I should give you the benefit of the doubt, but I must admit my patience is wearing a little thin with this sort of commentary. If my inference was presumptuous, please explain to me what you are saying. What point are you making? If you are just stating that disparate results are an inherent artifact of this sort of testing, you would be wrong. This is not only true in general, but as it relates to this case.
My response was to your comment about them not having made a test that has disparate results. It refers back to the previous paragraph that states that negative societal expectations have a demonstrable affect on individual test scores. My point was that we would get far closer to having tests that did not produce disparate outcomes if we get closer to a society where Black intellectual inferiority is not a mainstream notion that influences societal expectations of Black people.
Yes, and I’m the martyr. :dubious: If I was short with you I apologize, and am willing to try to start with clean slate.
I don’t know. Maybe you should infer that it is a fact. A fact that you don’t seem to dispute.
How the hell you can infer anything from a simple statement f undisputed fact is beyond me.
sorry; duplicate…
Well sure it made its decision on the basis of trying to produce black captains. Not producing disparate results is identical to attempting to produce black captains. It’s just two ways of saying the same thing.
There was not a shred–not a shred–of evidence that the process was unfair other than that it produced disparate results. “Testimony” that the test was not accurately designed is not evidence of unfairness toward a given group. No test is satisfactory to all participants, particularly those who perform poorly on it.
And the only thing that makes it discardable is disparate results. If that, alone, is sufficient reason to render a test illegal, then nearly every single broadly-accepted standardized written (and many oral) test in this nation has just become illegal as a means test for qualification, because blacks as a group underperform on basically all of them to a greater ratio than the 4/5ths test requires. SATs; ACTs; LSATs; MCATs; ordinary academic exams; Pilot Certifications…the list is endless.
We’ll end up in an absurd world where the only allowable tests are tests that prove everyone is equal.
And my buddies at SCOTUS better agree with me on this. 
Hey, not my reply, I know, but I represent that remark.
Except that it deliberately truncates a more precise position to have an inappropriately negative rhetorical impact. And that does distract the conversation inappropriately.
The overwhelming evidence from thousands and thousands of tests is that various population groups, when averaged as a population, perform disparately on tests. Specifically, a population group self-described as “black” will perform differently from a population group self-described as “white” on various tests.
If the test in question is ability for the NBA, blacks–as a group–will perform superiorly. This despite huge preparatory disadvantages.
If the test in question is the SAT, blacks–as a group–will perform inferiorly. This despite absolutely equivalent opportunity, including such variables as societal class and family income.
Now you may complain that we have not rid the world of people who implicitly (perhaps even explicitly) believe in black or white (innate)inferiority for a given variable, but it is not as if their position is unsupportable, and it is not as if various alternate explanations of disparities among all groups–with varying degrees of difference magnitude and varying types of relative superiority–are well supported, either. To the contrary, most traditional explanations of differences–including opportunity and cultural bias–have not withstood scrutiny.
Populations are different. We’ll never get rid of those of us who think those differences are genetic until there is some sort of reasonable evidence that a genetic explanation is wrong. It is not enough to hope or wish that it is wrong. As I look at my family, with its identical cultural, social and opportunity variables, and see how different I am from my siblings, it is pretty obvious that genes affect who we are.
And what will you do if they do not agree with you? What will you do if the SCotUS determines that treating “blacks” (whatever that word means) as if they have inherent traits such as a relative lack of “intelligence” (whatever THAT word means) or “ability” is per se improper under the law, absent some really strong imperative that we do so? What if they are not impressed with your notion that there is some sort of inherent racial inability on the part of blacks to do well on tests (whatever THAT means)?