Test for Dwindling Retail Jobs Spawns a Culture of Cheating

There are actually people who can't figure out the desired answers to those questions?

most of us have trouble with "all" and "never" qualifications. it's one thing to be reasonable, not make excuses, and do one's best, but when one starts thinking deeply about various scenarios, then the "right" answer seems like an overly simplistic lie.

The real problem is that we don't have effective screens for employees. What is an hour-long interview going to tell you? Little. And you're going to have to do many of them. If you interview as few as 10 people at an hour a piece, that's $250 at $10/hr salary rates. Most likely, the person doing your hiring is getting more than that and so it could easily be in the $500-1000 range. And that doesn't even count the time used reviewing resumes. If you're in a labor intensive industry, you'd like to lessen the screening process if at all possible.

I think these tests are stupid. Unions hand out answer sheets to anyone that asks them, answers are available online, and it's not that hard to guess that a company wouldn't want to hire someone who thought that failures were always someone else's fault or that they usually quit doing things in the middle. We need a lot of good research in this area. It's very difficult to tell good workers from bad workers and that causes both businesses and good workers harm as the business can't tell who to hire and compensate at good levels. Anyone have any ideas?

Yes because psychology was built upon self administered tests. The idea that a person is competent enough to even understand the test is in question. Either way you get what you pay for.

I found this interesting:

"We see absolutely no evidence of any significant cheating taking place in the use of our assessments or that the cheating is substantially affecting the validity of the assessments," says David Scarborough, who helped develop the test and works for its owner, Kronos Inc.

Of course, that's what he would say, but what if he's telling the truth? If anyone stands to gain from research into what tests correlate well with job success, it's these guys.

It's entirely possible that the test still measures qualities correlated with job success, even when the applicants cheat to pass it. It's also possible that having any prescreening test -- even a totally irrelevant one -- improves the quality of employees.