Comment by skellington | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skellington | Hacker News Reader

Uh oh, you posted something factual that invites questions. HN not going to like this...

>>>Facing pressure to diversify an overwhelmingly white workforce, the FAA began using a biographical test as a first screen of candidates. Minority candidates were fed “buzz words” to bump their resumes up to top priority. Apparently saying your worst subject in school was science served as a golden ticket. Correct answers to the take-home biographical questionnaire were given in their entirety. These questionnaires were later banned. This was dumb, but it’s not the problem.<<<

Ok, besides the fact that this, along with the evidence that the magic keywords were given in secret to special groups, is blatantly illegal, after they banned it, what did the criteria become? What is the criteria today?

Did they switch to a primarily merit/skills based assessment of candidates? Did they lower standards and if so, by how much? Have they tracked their assessment performance against real-world performance across the ATC pool?

So how it works is there's a selection process to go to ATC school/training.

Just getting into training doesn't mean you get to be a controller, you get tested a lot and hard with very representative work (a close relative failed this actually), and only get to be an ATC if you pass well enough.

I think maybe you misread the article, because it explicitly says "Note that leaving behind qualified applicants from Collegiate Training isn’t why we don’t have more controllers"

I saw that. But it's laced with political overtones. The question is not just # of controllers, it's the quality of controllers.

Have they lowered the standards to get through ATC school? What is the truth?

Just asking so I have ammunition against right-wing arguments.

I assume you want ammunition against your own arguments. But I'm confused about what you're asking: you were talking in your original comment about the _admissions_ process to ATC academy, and now you're talking about the process to _graduate_ from ATC academy. So let me see if I'm clear about what you're asking: despite the fact that aptitude requirements to get into ATC academy did not change, are you asking about whether the standards to _leave_ ATC academy were lowered? What would an answer to that question prove?

No, they haven’t lowered the standard to graduate.

How do you know? Do you work for FAA?

We wouldn't have to guess and allow for right-wing conjectures if FAA were just transparent on the process and if any changes have been made.

> We wouldn't have to guess and allow for right-wing conjectures if FAA were just transparent on the process and if any changes have been made.

There's no world where you out-research every conspiracy theory, especially all the right-wing ones during an Trump/RFK/Musk era.

But for what it's worth the family member who failed was a minority, even though my father was an ATC, so all else being equal you'd expect them to have a relatively good set of chances (just due to genes, if that's a thing).

But if the standard to get into school was lowered (not saying it was as I have no evidence), that it would alter the output. If not in quality then in volume.

The author's argument is that aptitude requirements did not change, but what changed is that some candidates were now less experienced after not having gone through ATC degrees. (But the author doesn't attribute the tragedy to that, in any case, so speculating about a counterfactual is something else.)

Good context for the "magic keywords" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901362 which is now folded:

> The list is on the last page of this document: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Vi9dDtZvbwHDafrygRG... It looks like it's a page that was photocopied from a book about how to write a resume. It's a list of dozens of incredibly generic verbs like "manage", "analyze", "administer", "make", "improve", "design", etc. pretty much any resume will have at least some of these verbs.

So it's not a secret code, but rather "tailor your CV for the job, ok?"

Not only was it blatantly illegal. How do you trust the overall judgment of the people who signed off on it? Who thinks it’s okay the make a mandatory screening test for air traffic controllers where the scoring rubric is basically random and has a 90% failure rate unless you have secret information from affiliated groups.

What else did they think was a good idea?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com