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Pursuant to my earlier postings about ADA and personality testing (see here), I found this comment on an interesting listserv from IPMAAC. This author, who I believe is an attorney, notes that:
The problem with the district court’s analysis is that the practical effect of the use of the MMPI is similar no matter how the test is used or scored-that is, whether or not RAC used the test to weed out applicants with certain disorders, its use of the MMPI likely had the effect of excluding employees with disorders from promotions.”This may put us on the slippery slope, because
inventive plaintiffs’ lawyers may use it to challenge other personality tests that tend to exclude people with characteristics that are associated with psychological disabilities, even though the test was in no way designed or used to identify that disability.
Read the complete comment here.
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Posted by Michael Harris
on June 24, 2005
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No problem. Here’s the defense, per the referenced source, with which I agree:
Just give the test after making an offer (which you can retract per the test results) and make sure you can prove it is “job-related and consistent with business necessity.”
So, forget about it as a screening tool.
And good luck on business necessity. It’s a bear.
Just ask fire and police departments and their lawyers, who have been through the wringer on things like tests of ability to drag a body out of a burning building, the necessity of which would seem self-evident, but which have tremendous disparate impact on women.
I/O psychs need to be — and presumably are — working on personality tests that are very narrowly focused on relevant traits and measure those traits well. Or tests that do not have a disparate impact on the mentally ill (a tough nut).
This is a minefield. Keep us posted, Michael, and please correct me if I’m wrong, since you’re the expert on this.