To explain the issue further, tersely, at the risk of being downvoted, in America, the average score among blacks is a standard deviation lower than that of whites, on IQ tests, that is, 15 points. Given that IQ is normally distributed for the most part, using IQ as a factor in hiring will reduce the proportion of blacks who pass the 'bar.'
This gap may diminish if you're looking at a pool of people who passed some previous threshold, eg they have a degree in math. But even then, some of the gap remains, due to the shape of normal distributions. Think of the heights of men and women, and how even if you looked only at people six feet and taller, the proportion of women in that pool who just barely meet the threshold of 6' would be much higher than the similar group of men; despite the cutoff, the average height of the women would still be less than the average height of the men, within that group. Draw overlapping bell curves to see this visually, and analyze the areas under the graph of each distribution, to the right of a given cutoff point.
We do have a law against invidious racial discrimination. The current implementation of the law states that in practice, if some selection mechanism has a passing rate for one minority that is less than 80% of that whites, that is evidence of discrimination in the absence of validation of that mechanism. This is known as the four fifths rule. A test in which 10% of whites and 7% of blacks passed would fall afoul of this law. Say you set a 115 IQ threshold. That is +1 S.D. from the white mean roughly, and +2 S.D. from the black mean, meaning 16% of whites and 2.3% of blacks would pass, if drawing from the general population. That wouldn't even pass a 'One fifth rule,' let alone a four fifths one.
And validation is no sure thing either - police and fire departments have had these tests validated and still have the results thrown out regularly, due to disparate racial impact, i.e. relatively few blacks and Hispanics (average IQ: ~90) passing the test.
On a related note, explicit racial and gender quotas are more efficient than the race- sex- and IQ-blind, approach in use today. A quota would mandate in effect different thresholds for different groups, but it would allow one at least to use this selection mechanism. Within given groups, one would obtain more efficient outcomes. The problem with quotas is that they make racial preferences explicit, while abandoning such selection methods entirely is only an implicit, de facto racial preference, a rather subtle and hidden one at that.
There is updated research on the issue of differing distributions of scores between the groups of people characterized as "black" and "white" in the United States. The score gap is narrowing, according to an important review article published this year by the American Psychological Association,
and investigating how the gap arose in the first place has been very illuminating about the effect of early childhood environment and formal schooling on the development of IQ. But, yes, the reason the Supreme Court ruled as it did in the 1971 Duke Power case is that there has been a difference in the distribution of IQ scores among "white" and "black" people in the United States, and also an odious legacy of efforts to deny employment opportunity to black people, so if a company has a particular hiring process, it had better make sure that the hiring process will "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used."
How is this a black vs. white issue? There are plenty of smart people of all races who are unemployed.
Like the article stated, it's due to lack of experience in the job they are applying for, coupled with the skills gap. Employees are asking for more experience than applicants have.
Intelligence is not a factor if they are only looking for experience.
Awesome. Aping the accreditation, credit and degree system of brick and mortar academe doesn't make sense for the latest generation of educators - udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, et al. Proctored exams to verify that the student knows the material are the way to go.
For final exams that cover an entire course, a test independently designed by a third party, using input from employers, entreprenuers and academics, might be a great supplement. Where you took the course would be irrelevant, so long as you could pass the test. It would allow for easy comparison of students in different programs.
Testing is a vital step in providing a credential at least as valuable as a college degree.
Yes, this seems like a much more appropriate progression than imposing the credit-degree system on online education. A standardized test would assess the depth of one's knowledge, with proper validation and scoring to allow one to compare any one test-taker to another. It's also more meritocratic, because as it is, one might be forced to compare the grades of say, a Stanford grad with that of a Cal State grad, and there's no easy way to compare the two given the potential differences in course content, difficulty, grade inflation, peer competitiveness, etc. With a way to objectively compare students, the value of a prestige degree, decoupled from the implied intellectual capacity of its holder, might decline.
We already do this with Advanced Placement tests, although it would make sense to have more granular grading, to distinguish say the top .1% from the 1% from the 10%.
The most important part of this, for it to gain mainstream credibility, is for employers to actually hire people on the strength of these qualifications, as well as their interviewing skills, demonstrated work ethic, etc. Most people are going to school to get a good job, and if online education can provide that cheaper and faster, then brick and mortar schools will lose a lot of their advantage.
The optimistic scenario: employers, entrepreneurs and teachers get together to decide what they want potential employees to know, and go about writing a test that covers that material. Then the educators write courses that cover that material. In turn, these schools might even publish their student passing rates, pointing the way to the best teaching resources and methods.
While there'd be a certain amount of teaching to the test, if the tests are written well, that's not such a bad thing - the student would ace the test by knowing the material.
