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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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