When it comes to junk science and the interpretation of it, I have news for you: the wheels have officially and totally come off the wagon.

A new study published in Journal of Applied Psychology is calling for a revival of research into possible test bias in standardized testing. A topline read of this new report offers some truly startling and impressive looking information:

Results based on 15 billion 925 million individual samples of scores and more than 8 trillion 662 million individual scores raise questions about the established conclusion that test bias in preemployment testing is nonexistent and, if it exists, it only occurs regarding intercept-based differences that favor minority group members.

Wow, more than eight trillion scores examined. This must be one heckofa study to have looked at all that information. The researchers used what they called “a powerful and sensitive methodology,” in search of test bias where heretofore no one has been able to find it. A provocative premise indeed.

In order to support this premise, the researchers engaged in some very sophisticated mathematics, like this item – one of my favorite passages – from page 653: (more…)

And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project.  On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”

Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.

A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.

Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals.  He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:

One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”

Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as ’social justice’ — this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for ’social justice.’

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