Using the Thorndike Model to Assess the Fairness of Cognitive Ability Tests for Personnel Selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study evaluates cognitive ability tests (CATs) as predictors of job performance against the Thorndike (1971) model of fairness. Meta-analytic results indicate that CATs substantially misrepresent the relative qualifications between Blacks and Whites in the U.S.: CATs predict an average job performance difference between groups as three times larger than is actually the case. In practice, then, Blacks are disproportionately burdened by more false-negative selection errors, and this tendency increases markedly under higher CAT score cutoffs. Thus, CATs work against proportionate representation of Blacks in the workplace. From an Employment Equity (E.E.) perspective, this is not justifiable because the pool of qualified Black candidates, relative to Whites, is considerably larger than is suggested by CAT scores.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".