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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Also worth looking at are literacy tests for voting rights given to African Americans in the Jim Crow-era southern United States.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...

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Or the English test questions the current Australian government wants to introduce for potential citizens:

https://theconversation.com/could-you-pass-the-proposed-engl...

tl;dr Australia wants potential citizens to get at least a 6/9 on the IELTS English exam (similar to TOEFL).

You need to do it in the UK for any type of long term visa unless you are from EU/EEA.

For citizenship you need both the English proficiency exam and the life in the UK test which is now actually hard even for natural borne Britons to pass.

For the citizenship, a British University degree is also accepted instead of an English test. (Or at least was ~3 years ago)

There was a recent story that suggested they were using AI to score these tests and it was failing people with Irish accents.

So does New Zealand. I don't see how it's an issue that they expect skilled migrants to speak the language.

But Australia has had (and possibly still has) bigger issues with discrimination and xenophobia. Consider that the official immigration policy was called "White Australia" until the mid 1960s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy

Wow, neither I nor my PhD girlfriend could do it on time. I bet if they had given it to all voters less than 1% could have voted.

I did it exactly on time. I'm not sure what's meant by an "interlocking part" of circles in Q30, though.

The reasons for and way in which they administered that are appaling. Still it made me think doing this the other way around would be interesting: would making would be politicians pass some form of unbiased well-designed test on the constitution, political system, financial principles, ethics, etc. have a positive effect on their performance? My guess is probably not but I do wonder what you could do if you let anything go.

In the context of tests being biased, I'll just note that your idea amounts to (unbiasedly) testing the test designers.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

> would making would be politicians pass some form of unbiased well-designed test on the constitution, political system, financial principles, ethics, etc. have a positive effect on their performance?

Who would be the authority that either makes these test questions, or monitors that they are unbiased?

There's no such thing as an "unbiased" test.

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