In a sense, the old format was one of the fairest tests going—blind to brand-name diplomas, sealed off from old-boy networks and immune to name-dropping. But it had other flaws. “The process isn’t rigorous enough to really get to know a person,” a veteran diplomat I know told me recently. “Anybody can be at their best for five hours.” A common complaint was that the exam favored people who were good test-takers but not necessarily cut out to be diplomats.

When State sat down with McKinsey in 2006 to explore revamping the test, the consultants recommended some major changes. After a year of behind-the-scenes tinkering, the Foreign Service Officer Test was officially relaunched in September 2007. Some parts, like the oral assessment, remain the same. Others are completely different. The four-part written test is now offered exclusively online, multiple times per year in hundreds of different locations around the world. And following McKinsey’s advice, for the first time in decades the selection process pays close attention to a candidate’s background and résumé.

In looking harder at the “whole candidate,” the new test represents a deep philosophical shift State hopes will help attract a broader, more diverse group of Foreign Service officers. The new test is designed to attract “as broad a cross section of America as possible,” Marianne Myles, former director of State’s Office of Recruitment, Examination and Employment and now the ambassador to Cape Verde, told me. “You don’t have to be a political science major. We hire people who run the whole gamut.”

I took the “old” FSOT in 2002 and passed both the written and oral exams but decided to continue on my path as a journalist. When I learned last year that the test was being revamped, I wondered: Will the new FSOT find the State Department the 1,100 candidates it wants? And, perhaps more importantly, will what State gets be what America needs? Logging in to the department’s online career center from my apartment in Berlin late one night last fall, I was determined to find out.

Taking the Test

I dove directly into an in-depth online application form requesting everything from the names of my college and graduate school to a detailed job history stretching back a decade. The most time-consuming part was the “personal narrative,” five mini-essays explaining why I was qualified to be a U.S. diplomat.

The questions were very general, but heavy on verifiable examples. “In the Foreign Service you may confront obstacles and/or adverse circumstances. … Describe a situation in which you overcame adverse circumstances. What steps did you take to deal with the circumstances/obstacle(s)? What was the result?” The journalist in me was pleased to see Personal Narrative Section (4a): “Communication skills are critical to successful diplomacy. Describe a situation in which you used your communication skills (either in English or another language) to achieve a goal.”

State wasn’t taking my word for it: For each question, I had to provide a name and phone number of someone who could verify the story I gave in my answer. In the months that followed, I heard that some of my references were indeed called and interviewed.

Eventually, I clicked “send” and was given a choice of dates to take the written exam. A few weeks later, I took the subway across town to the U.S. consulate on the west side of Berlin and sat down at a computer in a nondescript office to begin my test.

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.”