Tre, I don't understand how anyone can see it differently. Totally agree. If the test doesn't have some significant discriminatory element, the city should actually be penalyzed for discriminating against the firemen who scored well and were not promoted as promised. Your right, it wasn't a minority advocacy group causing a problem, its the city that decided to throw out the exam because of fears of lawsuits.
It is very concerning the vote was that close. This was clearly discrimination and we need to get away from discriminatory practices altogether. Personally, I would vote no on Sotomayor because of this bad decision.
x2
I'm going only off what I picked up from the news (NPR), but according to them, the exam has been reviewed and was determined to be entirely job-related, as it should be.
But, good ol' NPR, not able to leave well enough alone, asked a city official (he's one of the city attorneys, I believe), "Will you now look around and see whether there might be better exams available?"
What the heck is wrong with encouraging those who are looking for a promotion to
prepare better for the exam??
Did I score lower on the MCAT than my white counterparts because I'm black? Hell no, it's because I put in 5% of the effort they did. I got what I deserved. So guess what? While my friends are going to Duke and Stanford, I was tracking for East Carolina (no disrespect to ECU Medicine, mind you)! My scores were good enough, but I wasn't going to a top-tier school.
When something is totally non-biased, we should not be lowering the standards, period. If you need 85% (arbitrary) in order to become promotion-eligible, then that's what you need...black, white, brown, yellow doesn't matter one bit.
And if something *is* biased (I'm still shaking my head over all the SAT discussions of the past 20 years), we should be working on solutions to eliminate the bias, and NOT on ways to hold non-whites to lower standards.
Being black, it always pisses me off when less is expected because of color. Note: the MCAT is heavily biased against those who don't study for it. lol