Washington — The U.S. Air Force has contracted with the Gallup Organization to try to develop a psychological test to measure the character and leadership ability of potential recruits, with one goal being to bolster efforts to diversify the Air Force Academy and other training grounds for officers.
The effort was described today at a meeting here of the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors, which has spent much of the last year discussing how the academy can take in more black, Hispanic, and Native American recruits while staying within the limits on race- and ethnicity-conscious admissions policies set by the U.S. Supreme Court (The Chronicle, May 18 and May 25).
In an interview, David French, who helps oversee the Air Force Academy as a member of the staff of the secretary of the Air Force, Michael W. Wynne, said officials there had concluded that it might be a mistake to continue relying largely on personal interviews to gauge leadership and character when psychological assessments might do the job more reliably and efficiently.
Although the test is not being designed specifically to enhance diversity at the academy and in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, it could have that effect in two ways — by providing a new mechanism to identify talented minority candidates, and by enabling recruiters to spend less time interviewing applicants and more time seeking a diverse pool of talent, Mr. French said. For example, he said, the 1,700 volunteers who now serve as the Air Force Academy’s liaisons to high schools “will be able to get out and recruit more in the urban areas where we have poor draw right now.”
Mr. French cautioned, however, that the idea of using such a test “is unproven.”
But in a presentation to the academy’s board, Robert C. Lockwood, a partner in the Gallup Organization, expressed confidence that a test could help bring about a doubling of the number of applicants to the academy every year, with one result being a substantial increase in the number of minority students applying. “Talent is evenly distributed throughout the population,” he said. —Peter Schmidt
