Is our diplomats learning?

In these parlous economic times, it is worth noting that the State Department is planning on expanding its diplomatic corps by at least 1,100 new Foreign Service Officers.  Andrew Curry, however, casts some doubt on the selection criteria.  He has an essay at Foreignpolicy.com that discusses how McKinsey helped the State Department revamp the the Foreign Service Officer Test -- and not, apparently, in a good way:  I expected the multiple choice, or “Job Knowledge,” section to be the most interesting in terms of the priorities the questions revealed. I once imagined the Foreign Service to be a glamorous collection of pinstriped polymaths. And indeed, the sample question leading into the multiple-choice section (“What jazz musician helped introduce bebop?”) tested the sort of knowledge you can imagine needing to whip out to enliven an embassy reception. But “Job Knowledge” is a tiny fraction of the entire written test—just one of four sections on the exam, and not even the longest. I was given 40 minutes to answer 60 questions. There were no tricky vocabulary words or esoteric concepts, no special strategies to digest. There was one question on world religion. One on European history. One on George W. Bush’s tax cut. One on the U.S. Congress. One on the political leanings of the American media. There was nothing on oil, nothing on terrorism, nothing on Iraq or Afghanistan or China. Indeed, the questions were all the sort of stuff a regular newspaper reader with only a passing knowledge of American politics and history would be well-prepared to answer. As I clicked through the questions, I was surprised to see a large number—probably one sixth of the total—read like a pastiche of management-consultant jargon. I clicked through puzzlers about motivating employees, corporate restructuring, and organizational conflict management. A sample captures the feel: “A work group that has high performance norms and low cohesiveness will most likely have which of the following levels of performance: (A) Very high (B) High (C) Moderate (D) Low.” “Job Knowledge” also included questions anyone who’s turned on a computer in the last five years should be able to answer: “It is common practice of e-mail users to have some specific text automatically appear at the bottom of their sent messages. This text is called their …?” As I checked my answers, I counted silently. Almost half of the questions dealt with subjects that had nothing to do with politics, economics, history, or culture. Whoever designed the exam decided to devote about 20 minutes of it to testing what applicants know about the United States and the rest of the world. If you took out the questions on American politics, culture, and economics, you’d have even less. By my calculations, that means only about 10 minutes of the Foreign Service written exam requires any specific knowledge of—or even interest in—anything “foreign.”  I'd be curious to hear from FSOs about whether Curry is exaggerating or accurately depicting the deficiencies of the test.