JOB TEST SCORE FIXING BANNED
Steven A. Holmes, New York Times News ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE
The Bush administration, in a move mandated by the new civil rights law, announced Friday that state employment agencies may no longer increase the scores of black and Hispanic job applicants on a federally sanctioned aptitude test to improve their job prospects.
The change in the policy of raising the test scores, started a decade ago to encourage racial diversity in the work force, is expected to lead to questions over how best to evaluate applicants within state employment agencies and the businesses that had relied on them to screen applicants.
The shift is also likely to generate lawsuits as black and Hispanic job seekers find themselves frozen out of job referrals, experts in the field of employment discrimination law say.
''Employers will get applicant flows that might be heavily non-minority,'' said Lawrence Lorber, a Washington lawyer who represents large corporations in civil rights suits. ''They could end up with lawsuits.''
While Friday`s action applies directly to only one job-aptitude test administered by state employment agencies to about 600,000 people a year in 30 states, it presages similar bans on scoring of tests used widely by private employers and civil service bureaucracies.
That is because the practice of raising test scores to help black and Hispanic job applicants, a process known as ''race norming,'' was outlawed by the passage last month of a major civil rights bill.