Okay so layman's background on this bullshit.
FAA used to be simple. Prior experience hires, which are 99% Vets. Or off the street hiring with the completion of the civil service exam and then you go to the FAA's academy in OKC.
Then they interjected a College initiative into the mix, and an excessive amount of aviation schools got involved, flooding the market with candidates with ATC degrees. More candidates than slots meanwhile the FAA was still hiring vets too.
Then last year, the monkey wrench. The Biographic Assessment is literally a personality test. No other hiring avenues. 27,000 people took the initial test. Less than 3k passed. Mind you this is before they take another test, which is an actual skills and aptitude test (Air Traffic Skills and Aptitude Test or ATSAT), before they get a medical or a background check or pass the academy. So they're down under 1k who will actually be hired. This is after the sequester caused a year long hiring freeze.
The faa needs to hire and certify about 1-2k a year to keep up just with attrition from retirements. They're doing a bad job of that right now.
So the real issue with the bioq is that they weighted it to allow more "diversity", but they won't admit it, but they've admitted it, and they won't admit that they've admitted it.
Also, they supposedly scientifically validated the test. But then changed it significantly for this year (which allowed more people to pass too). But in an effort to be transparent, they refuse to release documents even to congress on how the validation works.
And then, someone in the NBAFCE got a hold of the answer key and released it to their members. Cheating the system for diversity's sake.
