"In several cases, students were questioned IN INTERVIEWS about the quality of the computer science curriculum that they were receiving at their HBCU"
Dear god, it's almost like they're being interviewed for a tech job or something.
... or any variation thereof is entirely a useless, antagonistic interview question. A school's relative "quality" holds little relevance to the applicant's merit. And the claimed comments that interviewers would imply, or outright state, that perhaps the applicant should have gone somewhere other than a HBCU are a varying combination of elitist, condescending, ignorant or racist.
“Tell me about a course project where you did well.”
Are reasonable questions for someone directly out of undergrad, with no internships, etc.
How do you know Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, etc cover the necessary topics? Are all students ask? I doubt it because that's the most basic background research OF THE SCHOOL that Google would do before going there.
In a job fair at a university, it doesn't make any sense for an employer (Google, FB, Lockeheed Martin, whoever) to get to the school and then ask "does the school I'm currently at even offer the curriculum to make you (the student/prospective hire) eligible?"
"There is no relationship between where you went to school and how you did five, 10, 15 years into your career. So, we stopped looking at it"
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-doesnt-really-care-any...
I said it was pointless, regardless of whether or not racism is part of the problem.
Is the Google interviewer curious about this new institution and its curriculum? Given that the interviewer works at the company whose name has now become so associated with search that a significant number of people use it as the verb to do so, why not fire up the company’s search engine and find out? Did they ask each of their peers whose education institutions they were unfamiliar with about those peers’ corresponding computer science curriculum? If no, then why not?
Why not just get straight to testing the HBCU candidates directly with the technical questions that touch upon X, Y, and Z as they would a regular candidate from the elite schools? (Caveat: if the candidate is an intern/co-op student earlier on their studies, then asking a modified version of this question is fair e.g. “I see that you’re a second year student. Have you covered X, Y, or Z yet?”).
One thing that everyone really needs to understand is that it is possible to have biased outcomes without intentional bias. Something that is innocent as face value such as asking a question to satisfy one’s innate curiosity can result in a material change in an interaction as a whole because in answering that question, there is less time for everything else. In a technical interview, that can be less time for the candidate to think about the answer, less time to deliver it, less time to explain it, less time time to test, and so on. And guess what, as the interviewee, you go into the room with the expectation and the mindset to answer questions as well as you can.
As people who work closely with computers, we get to use copy-and-paste in our daily work to make things easier. What is being asked of each interviewer is similar: behave identically with each candidate as is reasonable.
Yes, there are dangers of blindly copy-and-pasting such as using the wrong name, or making an invalid assumption. However, that danger also exists when using copy-paste in computers, and we employ processes to overcome it some cases or create a bespoke version in others. We can do the same here as well, but only if we all really, really, really want it.