My interpretation is that this was not "obviously designed to be gamed with secret information", it was just bad methodology. They had a goal of screening out 70% of applicants, but the remaining 30% of applicants needed to have a demographic balance that would not constitute a disparate impact, and they had to do this in a legally defensible way. Working backwards from that goal, they took biographical data that they had collected in the 80s and 90s and constructed a test program that, they believed, would give them the result they wanted. So if the answer weights are logically nonsensical, it's not because they were building in a secret password, it's because that's what happens when you build a model that's overfit on a small number of datapoints.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...
1) was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently
and
2) current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members
If you have another source for how the assessment was actually graded, I'd love to see it, but as far as I can tell, these claims are coming from a guy who seemed to just be making stuff up.
Look at questions 29 and 33. The first (about whether negative feedback bothers you) is a plausible question but the grading is completely nonsensical. The second question, about art/dance classes you took in college, is nonsensical both as to the question and the answers. These seem obviously designed to be gamed with secret information.
This was used as a mandatory screen for several years. The FAA didn’t fix it, Congress found out and banned it. How many people at the FAA saw this and green lighted it?