Testing Scandal Breaks

It's getting legs, slowly:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel's newly appointed interim top cop Eddie Johnson's fiancee is a Chicago Police lieutenant named in an investigation into alleged cheating on the department's lieutenant's exam, DNAinfo Chicago has learned.
  
  It's the same cheating probe that sources said helped derail Deputy Chief Eugene Williams' chances of being promoted to police superintendent. Now the allegations are part of a separate probe, this one by the city's Inspector General Joe Ferguson, sources said.
  
  Williams, one of the Chicago Police Board's three superintendent finalists passed over by Emanuel, was a "senior subject matter expert" who helped create the most recent lieutenant's exam. And he was the "final reviewer of potential exam content," according to the Police Department's Feb. 17 response to a Freedom of Information Act request obtained by DNAinfo Chicago.
  
  The probe into the alleged cheating began in November 2014, more than nine months before the written portion of the lieutenant's exam was administered, after a police Internal Affairs investigator filed a complaint based on a tip from an anonymous officer.

The anonymous tipster gave dates and times of the secret study group to IAD. IAD promptly tipped off the accused holding the secret sessions that IAD was going to investigate the next meeting. Somehow, they didn't find any evidence of a study group that particular day.

Fast forward to the first class of the list. Amazingly, there were SIX sergeants with ties to IAD who made lieutenant in the first class, all of whom were close associates of Wysinger's wife, who doesn't share Al's last name. There were also spouses, significant others or side-pieces of even more Subject Matter Experts who scored unnaturally high, higher than their previous promotional history would indicate (i.e. they had to be made "merit" sergeant after not scoring high enough, but now they all score in the top 25).

We've pointed this out before - certain people seem to test awfully well if they happen to be working in close proximity to a Subject Matter Expert. A former Chief's administrative sergeants scored #1 and #2 on a previous lieutenants test, and then his new administrative sergeant scored #1 on the following test. A tactical team had six members score high enough to all be promoted in the same Detective class, a team that had a Superintendent's son on it. A test proctored by a Subject Matter Expert in her own home due to an illness resulted in an almost immediate promotion to the tested individual. This completely circumvents the promotional percentages as the clouted can gift a high score on their minions and not have to waste a "merit" pick on them. You have people who know how to memorize answers (but who have seldom/never worked the streets) promoted far above their abilities, and then you have the 30% "merit" who are, in most cases, unable to pass a test and are then "gifted" a promotion, again, far above their abilities.

Does anyone really think it's happenstance that most of the scandals in the past few years were the result of "merit" people not knowing the job, the law, the process, and getting into trouble because they've never done the job?

Unfortunately, the DOJ isn't here to investigate crooked testing processes. And the likelihood of these thieves betting away with it is high - it's too politically unpalatable to bring in an actual legit firm of statisticians to tell you the chances of six people from IAD making the first class is something on the order of 1-in-a-few-trillion.