Revised at Behest of Minorities, New Civil Service Exams Ready

Eight years after the civil service qualifying examination was thrown out because it discriminated against minorities, the government has devised new competitive entrance tests that will be given across the country in June.

Americans interested in federal professional and administrative careers will have a chance for the first time in nearly a decade to compete openly at hundreds of examination sites around the nation for the roughly 10,000 entry-level jobs on the government’s management track. The government estimates 300,000 to 500,000 people will take the exams.

Since the old qualifying exams were thrown out, hiring for entry-level professional and administrative jobs has been done in a stopgap manner or on the basis of narrow tests aimed at specific jobs.

Under the new procedure, the Office of Personnel Management will administer six broad-based tests, each of which covers a range of related occupations. The tests were developed at a cost of about $100,000 each to select the best applicants and eliminate “adverse impact” on minorities.

Only 5% of black applicants passed the old Professional and Administrative Career Examination, or PACE, which was thrown out in 1982. Only .07% of them received a high enough score to be considered for hiring.

“Everybody wants people selected by the government to be of high quality,” said Richard T. Seymour, director of the employment discrimination project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which brought the original suit against PACE in 1978. “We just don’t want a thumb on the scale of merit.”

Since the abandonment of PACE, civil servants have been hired for 118 different kinds of jobs based on interviews, recommendations, college grade point averages and, increasingly, from specialized tests developed for specific jobs.

Former Office of Personnel Management Director Constance Horner described the process as “intellectually confusing, procedurally nightmarish, inaccessible to students and very difficult to explain.”

The hiring process is almost universally blamed for at least part of the problem described as the “quiet crisis” in the quality of government by the commission headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker. “There is a widespread sense that the overall quality of federal entry level employees is declining,” the commission said last year.

The new tests will not immediately end litigation over discrimination in PACE and an earlier test. In 1981 the U.S District Court ruled that once the government devised a test the court considered non-discriminatory, it would monitor the situation for five years to ensure that actual hiring was fair. If the court determines the new tests are non-discriminatory, then the five-year clock will start ticking.