| Abstract: | Some currently proposed strategies for educational and employment selection are based on a group-parity concept of fairness toward groups of persons identifiable by race, ethnicity, or other variables. Technical weaknesses in these strategies have been previously discussed by N. S. Petersen and M. R. Novick, L. J. Cronbach, and R. B. Darlington in the Journal of Educational Measurement (13:1, 1976). The present paper reviews and extends those discussions and examines the social and legal foundations of the group-parity concept. Because this concept is viewed as socially undesirable and its consistency with basic constitutional principles is questioned, this paper suggests that a socially desirable and constitutionally acceptable selection strategy can be fashioned more readily by the use of the formalism of statistical decision theory. Consideration would thus be given not to a person's race, sex, or ethnic group (except in a very few narrowly defined cases), but to the relative advantage or disadvantage experienced by a person and to the utility of the contribution to society that can be expected from that person as a result of any particular allocation of resources or comparative advantage. The major implication of this analysis is that the field of educational and psychological measurement needs to be broadened to include the measurement of individual disadvantage and individual utilities. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
