That’s a completely different question, of course, from whether an employer has reason to prefer higher over lower scorers on logic tests when it comes to the other side of the distribution, where issues of risk and performance are quite different.

In the Jordan case, prospective officers were given a Wonderlic test, an intelligence and problem solving test. The department only selected people who scored in the middle range, excluding both the lowest and the highest scorers. Why they wouldn’t select the highest scorers? Don’t know, but evidently (in 1996, remember) that hiring standard was consistently applied and “people who score high on Wonderlic tests” isn’t a protected class, so… no luck for Mr. Jordan.

The City’s claim that it rejected him because he is intelligent was clever…”smarts” is not a protected class under discrimination law (unless , I guess,you are so unintelligent as to have a disability).

I cannot imagine a rational decision-maker at a police department, or any employer for that matter, actually denying someone a job because they are “too smart.”

My guess is that this was the post-decision rationale that the department used to justify not hiring the applicant because of his race, his personality, some personal prejudice against him, or some other reason.

The problem is that the test is being deemed “defective” or whatever term you want to use because of the disparity in pass / fail rates – not because of the questions themselves. The DOJ complaint doesn’t address actual questions either.

From the complaint:

14. Since January 1, 2013, Baltimore County has administered and used at least three different versions of the written exam in the hiring process for BCPD entry-level police officer and police cadet positions. Each version was developed by the Office of Human Resources of the Baltimore County Government.

20. Between 2015 and 2016, African American applicants passed the 2015 Exam at a lower rate than white applicants passed the 2015 Exam. This difference between the pass rates of white and African American applicants on the 2015 Exam is statistically significant.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1198001/download

The DOJ isn’t making the claim about the level of the questions or the level of competency. You won’t find that claim anywhere in the complaint. They are simply saying that because there is a disparity in the pass fail rate, questions on logic, reading and grammar are not job related.

It was in Connecticut. The case was Jordan v. City of New London. Same town you may remember from Kelo v. City of New London fame.

The Jordan case sticks out in my mind, because it gets brought up again and again, across the Internet, to make the claim that police departments routinely screen out high IQ applicants. Every time someone does, I ask them to provide citations of it ever happening to anyone besides Robert Jordan, and to date no one has been able to provide anything. It both amuses and irritates me that all these years later, “it happened once” still gets universalized in some corners of the Internet (looking at you, reddit).

There is a slight issue in commenting on this, in that none of us have seen the test. We do not know what that level is. The article makes it sound like basic literacy, but for all we know it could be much more difficult. Similarly, the bar for “logic” tests goes very, very high.

Thinking more about this, if the test were designed to weed out weaker applicants, it may well be designed to require higher levels of proficiency than would be expected for most police officer – higher than what is actually needed for the job.

Unfortunately we can only speculate, because what is public knowledge is quite limited in specifics.