A critical goal for psychological science in the 21st century is to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in occupational contexts. One arena which will continue to benefit from a focus on equity is high-stakes testing, such as the assessments used for personnel selection and classification decisions. We define an equitable test as one that minimizes group differences based on protected classes such as race, sex, and ethnicity, while predicting criterion performance equivalently across groups. In this article, we provide an overview of the concepts of test equity, adverse impact, and predictive bias. We discuss how group differences in performance on high-stakes tests such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) could be driven by differences in crystallized intelligence (i.e., acquired knowledge), which is emphasized by the ASVAB subtests and related to socioeconomic status. We suggest that shifting the focus of some high-stakes assessments away from crystallized intelligence or supplementing them with other cognitive constructs could mitigate group differences in performance without sacrificing criterion validity. In particular, we provide evidence that tests of attention control—the domain-general ability to maintain focus on task-relevant information and resist distraction—could provide a more equitable path forward.

21 世纪心理科学的一个关键目标是促进职业环境中的多样性、公平性和包容性。将继续受益于对股权的关注的一个领域是高风险测试，例如用于人员选择和分类决策的评估。我们将公平测试定义为基于种族、性别和族裔等受保护类别最小化群体差异，同时在不同群体之间等效预测标准表现的测试。在本文中，我们概述了测试公平性、不利影响和预测偏差的概念。我们讨论了在诸如武装部队职业能力测验 (ASVAB) 等高风险测试中表现的群体差异如何由晶体智力（即获得的知识）的差异驱动，ASVAB 子测试强调了这一点，并与社会经济地位相关. 我们建议将一些高风险评估的重点从结晶智力转移或用其他认知结构补充它们可以在不牺牲标准有效性的情况下减轻群体表现的差异。特别是，我们提供的证据表明注意力控制——保持对任务相关信息的关注和抵抗分心的领域一般能力——可以提供更公平的前进道路。