Psychological assessment is expanding its application into industry setting including personal vocational determination, predication of future performance. But there are wide spread controversy concerning its reliability, validity and even bias. If not chosen properly, its application could harm psychological testing itself and the people involving the process. Among factors which infect effective of assessment, bias is the most harmful. Bias in testing refers to the presence of systematic error in the measurement of certain factors (e.g., academic potential, intelligence, psychopathology) among certain individuals or groups. The possible presence of bias toward minority groups has resulted in one of the most controversial issues in psychological testing.
The degree of test validity when used with ethnic minorities is of central importance to the legal issues, research data, and guidelines for the individual clinician. If investigated from the perspective of content validity, popular individual intelligence tests appear on the surface to be culturally biased. This conclusion is based largely on early intuitive observations that many African American children and other minorities usually do not have the opportunity to learn the types of material contained in many of the test items. Thus, their lower scores may represent not a lack of intelligence, but merely a lack of familiarity with European American, middle-class culture. Another consideration is the adequacy of the predictive validity of various tests when used with minority groups. Because one of the main purposes of these tests is to predict later performance, it is essential to evaluate the extent to which the scores in fact adequately redict areas such as a minority’s performance in certain vocation and even in certain position. But the testing such as WISC and the WISC-R gives no confidence of the predictive validity which limited its applications in enrollment process.
Although the debate is not resolved, guidelines have been established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for the use of psychological tests with minority groups in educational and industrial settings. The basic premise is that a screening device (psychological test) can have an adverse impact if it screens out a proportionally larger number of minorities than no minorities. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of the employer to demonstrate that the procedure produces valid inferences for the specific purposes for which the employer would like to use it.
Looking back from psychological testing and its evolution, it should be obvious that the problems are both complicated and far from being resolved. When it widely apply to industry setting, it should carefully manipulate and some legal constrain should be more strictly imposed on the whole process.