What I Wish I Knew About Assessment 1

A quarter of a century ago I wrote a book on personnel testing. I'm now writing another. I've done two Annual Review chapters, and I've done individual assessments for promotion, transfer, and hiring decisions. I've developed and validated testing programs and exercises for assessment centers. I've had the expert witness experience. I've been invited to speak-here and elsewhere-on assessment topics, presumably because the people who invited me thought I might have something to say. I've thought so, too. Now I'm not so sure. In retirement, one wants to look back fondly at what one has accomplished. It's unsettling to realize that less has been accomplished in the last quarter of a century than all the activity would suggest. The last quarter century can be called the EEO era in personnel selection. Shortly before the EEO era began, Marvin Dunnette outlined an idea for individualized assessment and decision making. A little before that, he and I and others wrote articles calling for the prediction of multiple criteria. Such ideas and others of the early 1960s were worth pursuing. We didn't pursue them because we got preoccupied with laws and regulations and court decisions that, in all too many respects, froze the field of personnel assessment at a 1965 level. I make no apology for that preoccupation. Our society, through its many prejudices, had placed too many obstacles to good jobs in the way of too many well qualified people. Those obstacles had to be removed, and professional assessment techniques helped remove the. Nevertheless, I regret that the unfolding of events early in the EEO era fossilized some ideas and procedures that deserved further development. I wish I know how that development would have turned out. Not all areas of study were so directly preoccupied with EEO issues. The coming of the computer age led scholars to important advances in educational assessment methods and to new areas of research in cognition. I didn't keep up well with the relatively new developments in these other fields, but I think they may have untried relevance for us. I've settled on a list of twelve things I wish I knew. The list is incomplete, but long enough to stretch your patience. Wishes in my list are grouped under three headings. The first set stems from undeveloped ideas set aside because of the EEO preoccupation. The second set emerges from my ignorance about the work of our intellectual neighbors. The third set-a nontrivial set-has grown out of just plain frustration!