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Well it depends on the job right? They are going to have janitors and office managers and truck drivers and sales reps and the like. If they have the test for all jobs then it is a problem, because not all jobs do require that level of thought even in a power company.
Regardless of that again, if you use a test which "assigns the same IQ score to a glue-eating retard and a more-or-less functional person" and that test also happens to misdiagnose mainly black people into the glue eater category AND you have been previously refusing to employ black people, then there isn't much reason for people to believe you when you say that actually it really does correctly weed out people who can't design power plants. They are going to see that it weeds out the people you were previously choosing to weed out and that it appears to be wrong in at least some regard. You defense of "Yes we know it is wrong, but it still weeds out who we want" is going to pattern match to exactly what you were doing before, only more sneakily. You don't have enough credibility to convince them you will use an admittedly flawed test correctly.
So, to be clear, I don’t know if the Wonderlic specifically has these diagnostic blind spots. Like I said, the data Rushton was working with was spotty and relied on extrapolating scores from data that was less than fully standardized. It’s quite plausible that the Wonderlic does not consistently produce such counterintuitive results; it is probably fairly accurately sorting individuals into broad tiers of cognitive ability. IQ is important even for a truck driver and a janitor. A truck driver could jeopardize company property by being more likely to crash the truck, or expose the company to financial/insurance issues by failing to consistently observe traffic laws. A janitor could fail to lock up a room full of expensive equipment, opening up the company to burglary or things like that. Things like this are absolutely worth guarding against by ensuring you’re hiring conscientious, intelligent, mentally flexible individuals.
I totally agree with you about why blacks would not trust the motives of a company which had previously explicitly discriminated against them. That being said, it’s worth delving into the specifics of the policies which got Duke Power into legal trouble. The Duke Power station in question did hire black employees — it just restricted them to the Labor department. In 1955 it added an additional stipulation, requiring a high school diploma for employment in any department other than Labor. (It also offered to pay two-thirds of the tuition for a high-school equivalency training for employees without a diploma.) Now, again, I think requiring a high school diploma or its equivalent for jobs requiring significant cognitive labor is a pretty reasonable bare-minimum failsafe! They still hired menial laborers without a high school diploma. You didn’t need to be a smart cookie to be a janitor at Duke Power.
Then, in 1965, after the Civil Rights Act took effect, they added two employment tests — the Wonderlic IQ test and a test of mechanical aptitude — for employees (black or white) who wanted to transfer from Labor to a higher-paying department. The score thresholds were set at the median for high-school graduates. Again, they were not asking for geniuses. They were asking people to meet a cutoff achieved by 58% of white employees.
Only 6% of blacks met that cutoff! Only 6% of black adult employees were at the cognitive and aptitude levels of the median high school graduate. The ones who did could be promoted at the same level as their white counterparts. Do you have specific reason to believe that both the Wonderlic and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test were wildly mis-measuring the relative cognitive abilities of black employees vis-a-vis white employees?
We've kind of got multiple questions here: Assuming it was being administered fairly (as you pointed out above we may not be able to trust the people doing so we can't be sure if that 6% is accurate), is it reasonable to assume in 1965 that an average black person of equal g to a white person would have the same chance to score on the tests even assuming it measures both accurately? Wonderlic themselves say that knowing the syllabus and having a study guide help your score. So it is not just a test of cognitive ability. The verbal questions require vocabulary, which is learned. A smart person with a lack of schooling will struggle with those questions. Someone who has not taken tests before may not have the test taking skills that help. As for the Bennett, looking at the example questions it appears to be measuring your education not cognition at least some of the time. Again there are practice flashcards and so on, indicating it is not just a cognitive test.
Here is the explanation for one of the answers on a sample question:
"You know that the tangential speed of meshed gears is the same. Also, the rotational speed and radius of gear are inversely related to constant tangential speed. In mechanism A, the driving gear (on the left) meshes with a larger gear. The smaller gear which moves the chain is connected to the same shaft as the larger gear, which means that the rotational speed of the smaller gear is equal to that of the larger gear. However, in mechanism B, the driving gear directly meshes with the small gear, which drives the chain. This means that the smaller gear will rotate faster compared to the larger gear in mechanism A, which implies that the chain will move faster in mechanism B."
Is this measuring cognition or is it measuring something you have been taught? Or is it measuring cognition assuming you have been taught the underlying principles?
In 1965 the average black and white person have very different educational and socio-economic backgrounds as to whether they have been taught anything about "the rotational speed and radius of gear are inversely related to constant tangential speed" or the conceptual formulas about pressure and force moment as the test says you require to know. So the first answer is that those tests are only measuring cognition assuming you meet certain standards about the level of knowledge you have. It might be that 6% of black people taking those tests met those standards, but it doesn't show they didn't have the cognitive abilities to meet those standards. It was mis-measuring cognitive abilities because it wasn't purely measuring cognitive abilities. Indeed that is exactly one of the arguments used by the court:
"Basic intelligence must have the means of articulation to manifest itself fairly in a testing process. Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences.."
To be clear I am kind of agnostic on whether it should be up to companies to make up for prior government discrimination (poor segregated schools) at the direction of the government. But it is clear the tests they were using were not just measuring cognition. They had built in assumptions about what level of knowledge people taking the tests had at a very minimum.
All of that is entirely separate as to whether there is some type of ability that is different between black and white people that such that IQ tests get the same result for people with very different levels of apparent intellect.
I certainly don’t dispute that — I myself cannot make heads nor tails of the sample question from the Bennett test you provided, presumably because I have close to zero familiarity with the relevant concepts and terminology.
However, I will again point out that these tests were being used as a filtering mechanism for the non-menial job departments at a major energy company. I find it a priori very plausible that there was a good reason for Duke Power hiring executives to believe that some level of prior familiarity with these fields of knowledge was important for determining eligibility for transfer to those departments.
Also, since the score thresholds for the Bennett test were also set to the score for the median high school graduate, it’s entirely possible that the question you linked is one that the vast majority of the tested employees would have gotten wrong, while still managing to obtain the minimum required score. Without knowing what the median score was, it’s tough to gauge whether the chosen score threshold was reasonable and fair, or whether it was unnecessarily onerous in a way that could have been expected to unfairly exclude otherwise-qualified candidates.
Sure, that's why I said that the government holding Duke responsible for accounting for the admitted failure of the school system is potentially problematic. But it does mean those tests can't be held to be representative of cognitive ability on its own.
There do also appear to be questions that are easier and harder, and there are diagrams which is probably why the explanation made little sense without them. There are some electrical diagrams I would struggle with without reviewing what i was taught some 40 years ago. I don't know enough about the test to know what the spread of answers was expected to be.
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