Declining American competitiveness in world economic markets has renewed interest in employment testing as a way of putting the right workers in the right jobs. A new study of the US Department of Labor’s General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) Referral System sheds light on key questions for America’s employers: How well does the GATB predict job success? Are there scientific justifications for adjusting minority test scores? Will increased use of the GATB result in substantial increases in productivity?

Fairness in Employment Testing evaluates both the validity generalization techniques used to justify the use of the GATB across the spectrum of US jobs and the policy of adjusting test scores to promote equal opportunity.

This volume is one of a number of studies conducted under the aegis of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences that deal with the use of standardized ability tests to make decisions about people in employment or educational settings. Because such tests have a sometimes important role in allocating opportunities in American society, their use is quite rightly subject to questioning and not infrequently to legal scrutiny. At issue in this report is the use of a federally sponsored employment test, the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), to match job seekers to requests for job applicants from private-sector and public-sector employers. Developed in the late 1940s by the US Employment Service (USES), a division of the Department of Labor, the GATB is used for vocational counseling and job referral by state-administered Employment Service (also known as Job Service) offices located in some 1,800 communities around the country.

Front Matter
Summary

The Policy Context
Issues in Equity and Law
The Public Employment Service
The GATB: Its Character and Psychometric Properties
Problematic Features of the GATB: Test Administration, Speedness, and Coachability
The Theory of Validity Generalization
Validity Generalization Applied to the GATB
GATB Validities
Differential Validity and Differential Prediction
The VG-GATB Program: Concept, Promotion, and Implementation
In Whose Interest: Potential Effects of the VG-GATB Referral System
Evaluation of Economic Claims
Recommendations for Referral and Score Reporting
Central Recommendations

References
Appendix A: A Synthesis of Research on Some Psychometric Properties of the GATB
Appendix B: Tables Summarizing GATB Reliabilities
Appendix C: Biographical Sketches, Committee Members and Staff
Index