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High Court's Right Call

To the Editor:

I hail the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in upholding the appeal of white firefighters in New Haven who scored high on a promotion examination that fairly and objectively measured merit and fitness.

When a test is job-related, fair, objective and non-discriminatory, as this one was, adverse impact is irrelevant. Physician qualifying exams and state bar exams, as well as qualifying exams for Stuyvesant High School and The Bronx High School of Science, are completely uninterested in claims of adverse impact, as they well should be. Adverse impact only has a claim of validity if a test is not job-related.

It would be wrong to include questions on Latin and Greek grammar on promotional exams for firemen, but if a knowledge of Greek and Latin were prerequisites for a graduate program in classical linguistics, they would be appropriate.

Minority fraternal organizations have every right to demand that exams be non-discriminatory and objective. They are totally in error when they claim that an exam is biased because their members did not score well absent proof of non-job-relatedness in the exam. Low and failing marks are not synonymous with bias.
DR. GEORGE SILBERMAN,
Retired Sup. III, Social Work