
WSJ: "India Graduates Millions But Too Few Are Fit to Hire" - Yes, But ..... - kingsley_20
http://blogs.zoho.com/general/wsj-india-graduates-millions-but-too-few-are-fit-to-hire-yes-but
======
shrikant
Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA?

This is definitely not the case in India - most companies that come to an
engineering college campus for mass hiring follow this process:

1\. Initial screen on grades 2\. Written test for for those past the first
filter (might be technical, or an "IQ" test) 3\. In-person interview

Of course, keeping in mind some of the people that go through this process
successfully, the bar is laughably low for all of these. (And of course, mass
hiring companies get lazy and re-use questions, so there's quite a thriving
industry built around 'question banks' for steps 2 and 3 above.)

~~~
patio11
_Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA?_

Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular
use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on
African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially
neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.

This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being
risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more.

(This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual
monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really
useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a
mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are
virtually irrelevant.)

~~~
tomjen3
>Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular
use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on
African American employees.

Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less
intelligent than people of other races?

~~~
jbm
At the risk of replying seriously to a flippant comment, it is a stretch to
say that the IQ test is a rock solid method to identify intelligence.

It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly
on IQ tests as opposed to other groups.

I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After
all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than
other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information
actionable?

~~~
temphn
Well, there are certain mission critical kinds of areas -- like medicine or
bridge engineering -- where this knowledge is actionable.

Certainly people here on Hacker News don't need to be convinced of the value
of finding elite engineers, or the very real wealth they can generate from
book learning.

The problem is the doublethink that allows the IQ elite -- graduates of highly
selective institutions like Harvard and Stanford -- to pretend that there is
no such thing as an IQ elite, while simultaneously selecting their peers
(coworkers, marriage partners, fellow students, etc.) from that very same
ostensibly nonexistent IQ elite.

The contrast is whiplash inducing. One minute IQ doesn't matter, the next
minute everyone is talking about how all these "idiots" can't solve
FizzBuzz... Very big blind spot here, which many Asian countries don't share
in the same way.

~~~
sethg
I took an IQ test in fifth grade. I will never forget one of the questions on
the “general knowledge” section: “Who discovered America?”

 _Aha,_ fifth-grade-me thought, _a trick question!_ “The Indians,” I said
confidently.

The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is _generally
credited with_ discovering America?”

Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that
experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests.
I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to
work, hang out, or have sex with them.

The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that
FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general
programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast
as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is
going to be twice as good at programming.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'd be extremely surprised if you aren't misremembering. IQ tests are never
supposed to have sections like "general knowledge", "history", "celebrity
gossip", etc. "Who discovered America" is a textbook example of a non g-loaded
question.

If such a section was used on a test they described as an "IQ test", it was
almost certainly there only for statistical validation purposes.

There have been a number of studies done which ask obviously knowledge based
questions, obviously g-loaded questions, and unknown questions. They then
compare the statistical distribution of answers to the unknown questions to
the obviously bad questions ("who discovered America") and the obviously good
questions ("you want to carry a fox and two goats across the river in a 2
seated boat, but if you leave the fox alone with the goat the fox eats the
goat..." [1]). If you aren't misremembering, I suspect you were participating
in such a study.

[1] This is unbiased because all information is given. You don't need to know
what a fox or goat is, or have ever seen a boat. It could be rephrased "you
want to transport a X and two Y's from location A to location B. But if you
leave an X and a Y alone, you fail."

~~~
sethg
I don’t think I am misremembering and I don’t think I was part of a study.
This would have been around 1980, so the test was probably the WISC-R, which
was published in 1974; maybe they got better about eliminating loaded
questions in the WISC-III (which wasn’t published until 1991).

When I Google “who discovered america? wisc-r” I get several hits mentioning
this test question.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Upon further googling, you seem to be correct. Apparently the people designing
WISC-R never bothered to read up on the theory of intelligence.

This isn't even a new idea - it dates back to the original Spearman paper from
1904. Start reading on page 65.

<http://www.similima.com/books/psychologybooks/psych7.pdf>

~~~
jbooth
Not to mention that the answer which gives you more points of IQ, hence
meaning you're "smarter", isn't even correct. You can start with the native
americans, go through to the vikings, and I read a book recently that made a
_very_ convincing case that the Chinese sailed to South America in 1421-1423
before they shut themselves off from the world for 400 years.

------
zwischenzug
Graduates traditionally are trained by employers to be functional employees.

The point of the original article is that few graduates have any skills of use
to the employer, making their degrees worthless.

Having interviewed many Indian graduates over the last ten years, I've learned
to ignore their CVs and simply talk to them. If they seem bright and keen to
learn they can be useful, but they're only considered because they're cheap.

~~~
gaius
The difficulty I have found interviewing people who have been through the
mainstream Indian educational system is they say "yes" to everything.

    
    
      Me: Have you used technology X?
      Them: Yes
      Me: Tell me how you used it
      Them: I used it every day
      Me: What did you use it for?
      Them: I used technology X every day to do my job. It is a very good technology.
    

This goes on for a bit, and I can see them getting flustered, and they almost
seem to resent me, as if I'm deliberately and maliciously trying to humiliate
them by asking a question "that's not on the test". Whereas "no, but I used
technology Y" would be a perfectly acceptable answer.

------
tomstuart
Genuine question: would anything legally prevent an employer from giving an IQ
test as part of the hiring process if they wanted to? The standard interview
techniques often discussed on HN don't seem very far from that anyway.

~~~
weaksauce
Probably not but possibly. IANAL though and I think the HN questions are more
about the technology rather than characterizing the innate "intelligence" of
an applicant(if it can even be actually measured). I could see there being
litigation from a minority group or a different culture saying that the
standard IQ test as being racially biased towards white American people; thus,
the test would fall under the civil rights act of 1964. There are also
cultural differences that minimize the effectiveness of an IQ test being
useful across cultural boundaries.

see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_bias>

But really, why would you even want to use the result of a very flawed test
that really does not show the true level of intelligence to hire someone?
Assuming that the IQ test was perfect, intelligence is not the be all end all
to performance at a company. Why not instead interview the candidates using
performance tests in the specific areas that you are interested in?

------
wicknicks
I thought the reason for keeping graduating colleges as a recruitment
criterion was because large organizations just don't have the time to wade
through thousands of applications. The HR departments can't really tell the
difference between someone who can is super creative and someone who can just
get the job done. They look at CV, referrals, past experience.

Though I agree that creativity cannot be attributed to ivy-league alone.
Reminds me how Howard Roark got hired by Henry Cameron in the book
Fountainhead. Inspite of being a dropout, Cameron hires him based on Roark's
design work.

Current education system were primarily designed during the industrial
revolution. Focus was to give people enough training so that they can _operate
the machines_. Though US education system has changed quite a bit, most other
countries (for example, India..) are lagging far behind. Hopefully, this will
change soon.

------
srean
The other thread (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411695>) on HN took a
turn for the angry and the personal so I will put my thoughts here. Though
there will be few personal bits here as well.

It is ok to be dissatisfied with the education one received in India (and
blame your parents for making poor choices while you are at it). But for the
complaints to be understood by a non-indian I thing some perspective is in
order. I cannot even broach open all that needs to be said to even set the
groundwork for a wholesome discussion. So I will stick to few select quirks
that are quite unique to the Indian scene.

The first thing is that size of the population seeking college education is
just mind-bogglingly huge. College education is perceived as mandatory. Till
before a decade ago college education was thought to be the only, yes only,
conceivable route to an honourable livelihood. I am talking about people who
live above the basic subsitence levels and living (damn! why do I have this. I
start typing phonetically when tired and dont even notice it. Meant leaving of
course) out the richest.

On one hand we have this huge demand on the other we have the fact that
college education is unbelievable cheap, or was. Things are changing now. It
is still mostly cheap. To put things in perspective the entirety of my tuition
bills for my undergraduate studies in engineering was $15. Yes that is right
$15 for all four years put together. The way this works out is through govt
subsidies. Furthermore the subsidies are not evenly distributed. There are a
few top tier institutes that get a lot, less so for the second tier,
drastically less so for the ones that are lower. I think the idea was to
establish a a few key stirling institutes and drive traffic there. Part of the
reason they converged on this model was scarcity of resources, financial as
well as human and the fact that the govt was doing all the lifting.

But the capacity that these institutes can handle is tiny compared to the
demand. Hence intense competiton. The only way to get flow control without
increasing capacity was to make the process more and more competitive. And
that competiton was not always aligned with the final goal of producing a well
rounded and competent student.

Then comes the teachers. Apart from the top tier colleges, a teaching job is
mostly an easy free parking spot. You can get by doing absolutely nothing. So
it attracts people who want to do nothing, or who could not find other
suitable means of employment. The salaries are modest, but given what you have
to do to earn it, it was pretty much a handout. A part of it was also to
absorb the grad students that were being produced and were not in high demand
because of then much slower economy.

What about private colleges you say. They used to have a stigma attached.
private colleges were the places you went to when you werent scholastically
good enough. How a rich dad would bail out his kid. Well the not so rich too,
they would rather go bankrupt than deny a college education to their children.
These colleges were mostly a glorified retail shop for degrees. Because of
this they would not attract the good teachers. But this is changing slowly as
they are throwing unignorable wads of money. But people still perceive it as a
fight between honour and money.

Now lets turn to the other thread. It was mentioned there that parents decide
what you want to study and it is either medicine or engineering. Yes there are
parents who are control freaks, quite a few of them actually but the phenomena
is not as nearly as widespread as the other thread would make you believe. But
yes there is a huge, huge bias for opting for medicine or engineering. The
immediate purpose of education is seen as a means of securing your future
rather than for the purpose of edification. Till before a decade ago the
security in those professions were head and shoulders above the other. By a
huge margin. And even then around 60 to 70% of the graduating engineers would
find a job right after graduation. A scenario that is quite drastically
different now. So you can imagine how the other "riskier" propositions fared.
I too was advised to straddle the options of medicine and engineering and did
so. Hated the memorization that went into biology. But now I do not begrudge
that at all. I feel I am at an advantage because of it.

But how was the quality of the undergrad education you ask? Well I went to a
institute that was shy of the top tier, and much of my undergrads I was quite
wasted anyway. But very early enough I developed deep contempt for many of our
teachers and chose to educate myself on my own. I cut classes frequently but
would spend time hidden in the library reading something of interest. Way more
productive than a lecture that I was sure I would get nothing from. I started
of as a mechanical engineer (well manufacturing to be precise) and now am
doing machine learning and there was a bit of robotics down the way, and CNC
machine programing and programing computational geometry algorithms in
between.

The government is aware of the problem and actually is trying to recruit
heavily from the US universities. But then again for the top tier colleges.

~~~
sdave
quite an excellent post. _But very early enough I developed deep contempt for
many of our teachers and chose to educate myself on my own._ that would be
true for most of us - self taught engineers we are. Also unlike in the US
where there are many universities of top repute, in India we have either the
IITs or NITs [wrt engineering] - and actual quality of education their is also
isnt great [ well i can say about NITs].

------
known
India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality. The whole country's economy is based
on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a
pioneer in the field. The most recent example of this ideology is the
"Business Process Outsourcing" industry.

New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a
quality deterioration in the final deliverable. This process will continue
till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another
"Killer" domain picks up momentum.

Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and
major takes place.

------
tathagata
I guess, these things sort themselves out in a capitalist society. I guess,
there is nothing really to worry about :)

Indian higher educational institutes and their ratings correlate well on a log
graph. This is the way it should ideally be (it is a well designed filter).
Only problem is that the highest rated institutes are few and far between. The
students admitted in these top-tier universities have cleared entrance
examinations with a standard deviation of less than 5% (this is a guess, it is
likely even less). A lot of potentially good students are therefore left out
of an opportunity for better education (rather a better starting job, due to
the hiring culture).

It is true that the 'education' in India sucks - it is outdated, and often not
worth the 4 years spent in acquiring it. However, the log correlation ensures
that top-tier universities are damn hard to get into, and those few than do
get into them (for example, the IITs) are by far the best in the world
(compared to anywhere).

Given some more economic pressure, more top-tier universities should popup
soon. As for finding customer service workforce, I think, its about time India
starts offshoring it elsewhere ;)

------
jkuria
Microsoft pioneered the use of brainteasers, really a form of an IQ test

------
sid6376
"So knowing that a college is rigorous in its admission standards is a way to
signal prospective employers that the graduates from that college are already
vetted." I would say that the admission standards here in India are very rigid
, going by the top two engineering entrance exams. For IITs 4k out of 150k
people who write the exam get admissions whereas for the RECS and some second
tier colleges the admission rate was around 15-20%. Hence i think the problem
is not that the admission standards are lax. What the wsj article was hinting
at a lack of basic comprehension and technical skills. Lack of comprehension
skills(in English) can be explained by the fact that English is not the first
language ,even though it may be the medium of instruction. The other weakness
has a lot to do with lack of interest, motivation and also a sense of lethargy
which sets in after going through two years of what can best be described as a
bootcamp preparing for the engineering entrance exams.

------
fecklessyouth
"Ultimately, an impressive college credential from a good college serves to a
prospective employer as an extended IQ test, a sort of legal signaling
device."

I know this community likes to hate on non-technical college degrees, but the
sort of thinking treats "real" liberal arts degrees quite unfairly. Believe it
or not, but broad, challenging programs produce a substantial change in the
willing student. Like it is often said, the technical knowledge is often
better obtained on the job.

------
teyc
Here is a question for the Indian readers:

Is there a cultural issue here? Perhaps the employers are looking for
forthright people, while (the limited number of) young Indian grads I've met
are usually soft-spoken and more circumspect. Could this be the issue.

I find what zwischenzug said to be true, that most graduates are trained by
their employers, not by the universities.

~~~
happyfeet
Looking back at myself - how I was when I graduated vs. with experience of ~10
years in the industry - I think it is more of an issue of exposure to the
right things than culture.

Besides what I find is a total disconnect of industry reality in college
education. The only way we could circle back to correct this is by having
experienced people from industry going back to academic roots to teach, to
improve quality of experience graduates go through.

With my current employer to bridge the gap & provide more exposure to students
& guide them, we go to colleges & schools across rural areas and we conduct a
program in partnership with "Junior Achiever" (<http://ja.org/>).

We hope such programs would eventually bridge the gap between industry &
academia and also help students get the right exposure.

------
djd
what i have from my own experience is every one treats technical courses like
a mathematical function. Go through course Y and you will be more smarter than
people from course X.I always keep hearing stuff like "Brigding the gap
between industry and acedemia" which i never seem to understand. Trying to do
something other then mentioned in your ciricullum is considered taboo. Most of
my friends have "outsourced" thier final semester academic projects to a
institute which prepares it for them. Dont trust me? have a look at this
<http://goaltechnologies.in/new/?page_id=13>

------
known
IQ + EQ = Fit to Hire

But IITs focus only on IQ and IIMs on EQ.

