First They Came For the Fire Buffs, Then They Came for the Science Nerds....

An interesting aspect of the 2009 court case brought by firemen in New Haven, Connecticut,  was the not very subtle disdain shown by members of the American academic elite towards the pretensions of those who thought that fire fighting required a degree of knowledge and intelligence. The aggrieved firemen had been denied promotion because the test resulted in white firemen doing better than their African American and Hispanic colleagues. See here for an insightful account.

An article by Nicole Allan and Emily Bazelon, graduate of Yale Law School, granddaughter of a judge of the US Court of Appeals, former law clerk for a judge of the US Court of Appeals and Senior Research Scholar in Law and  Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, reported without noticeable irony complaints about the unfairness of the test that passed too many white firefighters: it favored "fire buffs" (enthusiasts according to the dictionary) who read firefighting manuals in their spare time or who came from families with lots of firefighters.

One wonders whether Bazelon ever wondered whether she had derived an unfair advantage from her family background or felt guilty because she had had read books about law when she did not have to.

The article concluded:

If New Haven could start over, maybe it could also admit outright that it has more deserving firefighters than it has rewards. The city could come up with a measure for who is qualified for the promotions, rather than who is somehow best. And then it could choose from that pool by lottery. That might not exactly be fair, either. But it would recognize that sometimes there may be no such thing.

That has in fact been done in Chicago.

Meanwhile, admission into North American graduate and professional schools has followed the cities of the US by becoming increasingly less selective as intelligence and knowledge are downgraded and admission is increasingly dependent on vague and unverifiable personality traits.

Educational Testing Service, producers of the Graduate Record Exam, have now introduced a Personal Potential Index that will supplement (and perhaps eventually replace?) the use of the GRE and undergraduate grades for admissions to graduate school.

Basically, this new tool involves applicants nominating five evaluators who will provide assessments of "Knowledge and Creativity; Communication Skills; Teamwork; Resilience; Planning and Organization; and Ethics and Integrity". I can see Newton, Darwin, Einstein and James Watson all  tripping up on at least one of these.

The latest development is that the Medical College Admissions Test will do away with its writing test because it does not add much information beyond undergraduate grades. It will be replaced with a section on "behavioural and social sciences principles."

It seems that the point of this is to increase the number of minorities in medical schools although it is not clear why it is assumed that they will do better in answering questions about the social sciences and critical thinking  than in writing an essay and verbal analysis.

More changes may be coming soon. Already there are pilot projects in which schools are "doing brief interviews of applicants involving various ethical and social scenarios to learn more about would-be students".

It seems that these developments are a response to criticism of the MCAT from organisations like The National Center for Fair and Open Testing:

Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the center, said that the MCAT has been viewed as encouraging "memorization and regurgitation" and is "better at identifying science nerds than candidates who would become capable physicians well-equipped to serve their patients." The changes being proposed appear to be "responding directly" to these critiques, he said.

According to Wikipedia, "Nerd is a term that refers to a social perception of a person who avidly pursues intellectual activities, technical or scientific endeavors, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests, rather than engaging in more social or conventional activities."

Will the time come when the likes of Emily Bazelon are denied promotion or appointment because of their inappropriate buffiness or avid pursuit of intellectual activity? Not to worry. They could probably get jobs as firefighters somewhere.

Here is a prediction. As American universities increasingly select students and faculty because they are  communicative, culturally sensitive, resilient and and so on while cleansing themselves of all those buffs and nerds, China, Korea and a few other countries will catch up and then overtake them first in scientific output and then in quality.