WSJ: "India Graduates Millions But Too Few Are Fit to Hire" - Yes, But .....
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This is definitely not the case in India - most companies that come to an engineering college campus for mass hiring follow this process:
1. Initial screen on grades 2. Written test for for those past the first filter (might be technical, or an "IQ" test) 3. In-person interview
Of course, keeping in mind some of the people that go through this process successfully, the bar is laughably low for all of these. (And of course, mass hiring companies get lazy and re-use questions, so there's quite a thriving industry built around 'question banks' for steps 2 and 3 above.)
Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.
This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more.
(This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.)
Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?
It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly on IQ tests as opposed to other groups.
I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?
''Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?''
Simple answer is no, they didn't.
The court basically found that because African-Americans had suffered a lower standard of education (their wording: ''Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences in Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969)'') and that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. (it's an interesting case)
Whether that would be the same now, I don't know. On the other hand I could completely believe that companies are still worried by it, and so avoid IQ tests etc.
> The court basically found [...] that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.
No, not quite. The WP article (which incidentally I couldn't get at with your URL, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co worked) quotes the judgement as saying that they didn't question the company's motive, but that its policies were illegally discriminatory regardless of motive.
The WP article was a bit of a mess so I've been rewriting/sourcing it - and, yes, the court carefully states that it didn't believe it was deliberate discrimination. That part of my comment was incorrect. :)
Certainly people here on Hacker News don't need to be convinced of the value of finding elite engineers, or the very real wealth they can generate from book learning.
The problem is the doublethink that allows the IQ elite -- graduates of highly selective institutions like Harvard and Stanford -- to pretend that there is no such thing as an IQ elite, while simultaneously selecting their peers (coworkers, marriage partners, fellow students, etc.) from that very same ostensibly nonexistent IQ elite.
The contrast is whiplash inducing. One minute IQ doesn't matter, the next minute everyone is talking about how all these "idiots" can't solve FizzBuzz... Very big blind spot here, which many Asian countries don't share in the same way.
Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently.
The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?”
Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them.
The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.
If such a section was used on a test they described as an "IQ test", it was almost certainly there only for statistical validation purposes.
There have been a number of studies done which ask obviously knowledge based questions, obviously g-loaded questions, and unknown questions. They then compare the statistical distribution of answers to the unknown questions to the obviously bad questions ("who discovered America") and the obviously good questions ("you want to carry a fox and two goats across the river in a 2 seated boat, but if you leave the fox alone with the goat the fox eats the goat..." [1]). If you aren't misremembering, I suspect you were participating in such a study.
[1] This is unbiased because all information is given. You don't need to know what a fox or goat is, or have ever seen a boat. It could be rephrased "you want to transport a X and two Y's from location A to location B. But if you leave an X and a Y alone, you fail."
When I Google “who discovered america? wisc-r” I get several hits mentioning this test question.
This isn't even a new idea - it dates back to the original Spearman paper from 1904. Start reading on page 65.
In this case, though, it is biased because some people will have heard the puzzle before, and having heard it before is tied to culture rather than to intelligence.
The correct answer was "Wait 10 minutes, then leave if it's not open." But people with lower incomes were disproportionately likely to say you should just walk away and come back some other time. This is because people in low-income neighborhoods have been taught that loitering in an empty lot leads to bad things.
The good news is that there's also emerging research showing how test scores for blacks & women can be raised by exposing them to certain facts/examples that reduce the effect of "stereotype threat".
It completely debunks the theory of disparate impact, assuming you believe IQ drives general problem solving ability. This information would be useful in rejecting a huge number of baseless lawsuits.
It also suggests that racial gaps in education are here to stay, and nothing can be done about them. Therefore, we should accept them and move on.
I don't accept for a moment the notion that "blacks" are "less intelligent" than "whites", or even that we can with any useful precision define what these terms are, but the way you've summarized the points seems to illustrate well the reason people have such a hard time discussing this issue.
"After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?"
I didn't feel the need to carefully explain the exact policy implications of this fact since the hypothetical didn't give enough info to work from. I also don't feel the need to couch a conversation on this topic in terms of "I'm not racist" "scare" "quotes" and genuflections towards diversity since I think most HN readers can distinguish a positive claim from a normative one.
Our politics clearly couldn't be more different, but I didn't set out to offend you. I'm sorry.
For what it's worth, you are absolutely right that my hypothetical claim is stronger than most reasonable claims I'd make in reality. I wasn't aiming for completeness, merely trying to illustrate the fact that there are ways one can find such information reasonably actionable.
This is provable. Suppose that all racial groups were equally intelligent by some metric. Then the average value of that metric for each racial group would be the same. Assuming a sufficient resolution for the value range and millions of people taking the test, the odds of any racial groups average value being equal to any others is astronomically small.
"Disparate impact" reasoning in equal protection cases has a long history, by the way. One of the earliest cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886),
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553...
held that a local law that regulated laundries in San Francisco violated the federal Constitution because most of the laundry businesses banned by the law were owned by Chinese immigrants, while most laundries that fit the law's requirements were owned by people of "white" backgrounds. (Knowing the time and place of this case, it's rather plain that the law was designed to discriminate in that manner.)
Context matters. But some of the comments above are true, that today many companies use school credentials as proxies for intelligence, and give higher education institutions a lot of incentive to operate as diploma mills. But there ARE companies in the United States that use various tests (the Wonderlic test is one example) that are essentially IQ tests as part of the hiring process.
The current claim in the mainstream literature on hiring procedures is that the two most effective screening procedures for job applicants are
1) work-sample tests
or
2) IQ-like tests (these two are tied for first place),
with all other procedures such as personal interviews, resume reviews, diploma requirements, personal references, etc., etc. ranking lower in practical usefulness. IQ-like tests are also quite inexpensive (in the form such as the Wonderlic test) and thus fare well for organizations that use them. That is the current claim in the literature, across a broad array of occupations in a broad array of industries.
After edit: Here's a link to a reasonably good, current bibliography on IQ-testing issues, including some of the issues about legal requirements and trade-offs in efficacy of different ways to rate applicants for jobs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
The main issue with Griggs was that the court found that people who failed the test were no worse (at their job) than those that passed it. And, so, decided (rightly) that the test was not there for performance/ability reasons, but for other reasons.
They were mostly stuff like: "You are entering a burning factory which appears to be made primarily out of concrete. What sort of saw blade do you attach to your buzzsaws? a) Steel b) diamond coated steel c)..."
The court ruled that the test results should have been applied simply because the de-facto procedure of:
1) Promote people based on a test, BUT
2) If black people don't do well, ignore the test.
was racist in favor of blacks.
(Another question famously related to NYC geography, since the test was lazily copied from NYC.)
After Ricci was decided, a black firefighter sued the city over the test [1]. His theory was that weighting promotions via 60% objective written test/40% subjective oral test was racist since it had a disparate impact on blacks. He lost.
http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2010/04/22/news/aa3_nebri...
[1] I believe he lacked standing before the supreme court decision, since he suffered no harm.
Effectively for an undergrad 2 things matter - Your grades and your pedigree (IIT, Engineering students are the most valuable, and this combines with the reputation of institution. Commerce students are next in line, and arts students last.)
Basically these are proxies for ability discovery. Its pretty brutal.
Also on the point of getting interviewed - most companies just want someone who can learn, and has good enough grades and a workable grasp of English. Once you pass the tests, you are sent to their training centers where they will teach you whatever skills you required. The Tata training campus and is course is considered to be the equivalent of a 2 year Comp Sci. education in India.
Having a good grasp of code, is not necessarily an asset to get you into those jobs.If you want to strike out on your own and jump ahead of the curve, then I can see the merits of the suggestion.
The point of the original article is that few graduates have any skills of use to the employer, making their degrees worthless.
Having interviewed many Indian graduates over the last ten years, I've learned to ignore their CVs and simply talk to them. If they seem bright and keen to learn they can be useful, but they're only considered because they're cheap.
Me: Have you used technology X?
Them: Yes
Me: Tell me how you used it
Them: I used it every day
Me: What did you use it for?
Them: I used technology X every day to do my job. It is a very good technology.
Skills are acquired during the 1st year at the job. The credential still is meaningful - how much spadework is there to training an educated subject vs one with no vocabulary, no facility with theory, no proven ability to learn?
So yes, hire a successful college grad over, say, a tongue-tied inexperienced person without a degree.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_bias
But really, why would you even want to use the result of a very flawed test that really does not show the true level of intelligence to hire someone? Assuming that the IQ test was perfect, intelligence is not the be all end all to performance at a company. Why not instead interview the candidates using performance tests in the specific areas that you are interested in?
Threat of litigation prevents companies from doing a lot of things that they might otherwise do. In many cases, it is the most thriving and most desirable companies to applicants that can hire lawyers enough to be advised to be cautious and not take chances with the law.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/weekinreview/ideas-trends-...
It sure is legal, but not in the direction you'd expect.
Though I agree that creativity cannot be attributed to ivy-league alone. Reminds me how Howard Roark got hired by Henry Cameron in the book Fountainhead. Inspite of being a dropout, Cameron hires him based on Roark's design work.
Current education system were primarily designed during the industrial revolution. Focus was to give people enough training so that they can operate the machines. Though US education system has changed quite a bit, most other countries (for example, India..) are lagging far behind. Hopefully, this will change soon.
It is ok to be dissatisfied with the education one received in India (and blame your parents for making poor choices while you are at it). But for the complaints to be understood by a non-indian I thing some perspective is in order. I cannot even broach open all that needs to be said to even set the groundwork for a wholesome discussion. So I will stick to few select quirks that are quite unique to the Indian scene.
The first thing is that size of the population seeking college education is just mind-bogglingly huge. College education is perceived as mandatory. Till before a decade ago college education was thought to be the only, yes only, conceivable route to an honourable livelihood. I am talking about people who live above the basic subsitence levels and living (damn! why do I have this. I start typing phonetically when tired and dont even notice it. Meant leaving of course) out the richest.
On one hand we have this huge demand on the other we have the fact that college education is unbelievable cheap, or was. Things are changing now. It is still mostly cheap. To put things in perspective the entirety of my tuition bills for my undergraduate studies in engineering was $15. Yes that is right $15 for all four years put together. The way this works out is through govt subsidies. Furthermore the subsidies are not evenly distributed. There are a few top tier institutes that get a lot, less so for the second tier, drastically less so for the ones that are lower. I think the idea was to establish a a few key stirling institutes and drive traffic there. Part of the reason they converged on this model was scarcity of resources, financial as well as human and the fact that the govt was doing all the lifting.
But the capacity that these institutes can handle is tiny compared to the demand. Hence intense competiton. The only way to get flow control without increasing capacity was to make the process more and more competitive. And that competiton was not always aligned with the final goal of producing a well rounded and competent student.
Then comes the teachers. Apart from the top tier colleges, a teaching job is mostly an easy free parking spot. You can get by doing absolutely nothing. So it attracts people who want to do nothing, or who could not find other suitable means of employment. The salaries are modest, but given what you have to do to earn it, it was pretty much a handout. A part of it was also to absorb the grad students that were being produced and were not in high demand because of then much slower economy.
What about private colleges you say. They used to have a stigma attached. private colleges were the places you went to when you werent scholastically good enough. How a rich dad would bail out his kid. Well the not so rich too, they would rather go bankrupt than deny a college education to their children. These colleges were mostly a glorified retail shop for degrees. Because of this they would not attract the good teachers. But this is changing slowly as they are throwing unignorable wads of money. But people still perceive it as a fight between honour and money.
Now lets turn to the other thread. It was mentioned there that parents decide what you want to study and it is either medicine or engineering. Yes there are parents who are control freaks, quite a few of them actually but the phenomena is not as nearly as widespread as the other thread would make you believe. But yes there is a huge, huge bias for opting for medicine or engineering. The immediate purpose of education is seen as a means of securing your future rather than for the purpose of edification. Till before a decade ago the security in those professions were head and shoulders above the other. By a huge margin. And even then around 60 to 70% of the graduating engineers would find a job right after graduation. A scenario that is quite drastically different now. So you can imagine how the other "riskier" propositions fared. I too was advised to straddle the options of medicine and engineering and did so. Hated the memorization that went into biology. But now I do not begrudge that at all. I feel I am at an advantage because of it.
But how was the quality of the undergrad education you ask? Well I went to a institute that was shy of the top tier, and much of my undergrads I was quite wasted anyway. But very early enough I developed deep contempt for many of our teachers and chose to educate myself on my own. I cut classes frequently but would spend time hidden in the library reading something of interest. Way more productive than a lecture that I was sure I would get nothing from. I started of as a mechanical engineer (well manufacturing to be precise) and now am doing machine learning and there was a bit of robotics down the way, and CNC machine programing and programing computational geometry algorithms in between.
The government is aware of the problem and actually is trying to recruit heavily from the US universities. But then again for the top tier colleges.
The only thing I would like to add is w.r.t. to the teachers - apart from the IITs (and a few other select colleges), most of the teachers there are pretty pathetic, and I think the biggest reason is that the well-qualified people choose to rather work at a private company and earn 5-10x more rather than join a non-IIT college as a teacher. IITs are the exception because there is significant academic prestige to be a professor there, which most other colleges cannot claim.
FWIW, I myself chose not to join IIT since I couldn't get into CompSci there. At my college, which is considered among the next top engineering colleges after IIT, most of the CS faculty didn't even have a PhD in terms of qualifications, nor were they good in any other way (to be fair, other departments weren't so bad).
I taught myself CS and coding, because I really enjoyed them. But after I came to the US for grad school, I realized how much difference a good professor can make.
New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable. This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum.
Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.
Indian higher educational institutes and their ratings correlate well on a log graph. This is the way it should ideally be (it is a well designed filter). Only problem is that the highest rated institutes are few and far between. The students admitted in these top-tier universities have cleared entrance examinations with a standard deviation of less than 5% (this is a guess, it is likely even less). A lot of potentially good students are therefore left out of an opportunity for better education (rather a better starting job, due to the hiring culture).
It is true that the 'education' in India sucks - it is outdated, and often not worth the 4 years spent in acquiring it. However, the log correlation ensures that top-tier universities are damn hard to get into, and those few than do get into them (for example, the IITs) are by far the best in the world (compared to anywhere).
Given some more economic pressure, more top-tier universities should popup soon. As for finding customer service workforce, I think, its about time India starts offshoring it elsewhere ;)
I know this community likes to hate on non-technical college degrees, but the sort of thinking treats "real" liberal arts degrees quite unfairly. Believe it or not, but broad, challenging programs produce a substantial change in the willing student. Like it is often said, the technical knowledge is often better obtained on the job.
Is there a cultural issue here? Perhaps the employers are looking for forthright people, while (the limited number of) young Indian grads I've met are usually soft-spoken and more circumspect. Could this be the issue.
I find what zwischenzug said to be true, that most graduates are trained by their employers, not by the universities.
There is, but it's probably the same point that's been made over and over in the submission of the WSJ article to HN.
FWIW, what Sridhar says in his article is exactly what zwischenzug said too :)
Besides what I find is a total disconnect of industry reality in college education. The only way we could circle back to correct this is by having experienced people from industry going back to academic roots to teach, to improve quality of experience graduates go through.
With my current employer to bridge the gap & provide more exposure to students & guide them, we go to colleges & schools across rural areas and we conduct a program in partnership with "Junior Achiever" (http://ja.org/).
We hope such programs would eventually bridge the gap between industry & academia and also help students get the right exposure.
But IITs focus only on IQ and IIMs on EQ.