“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.”
By contrast, I was given an hour for the 65 questions on the reading comprehension exam. This section was a lot trickier, with lots of hair-splitting questions about sentence structure, grammar, word order, and meaning drawn from complicated texts.
But the hardest part of the test was yet to come. As part of the “total candidate” approach, the test now includes an hourlong biographical questionnaire. The 77 questions were a mix of multiple-choice and short-answer queries about work experience, leadership ability, and job skills. In a few sentences per question, the questionnaire asked for examples to back up any claims. A legalistic note at the beginning of the test warned that any fibs would be grounds for failure or prosecution. It was a lot of ground to cover in just an hour.
The questions—about everyday office skills, meeting people from other cultures, and leadership qualities—were so obvious and banal I began to think the test was more about writing under pressure than establishing bona fides. I finished the last question with less than a minute to spare, took a deep breath, and went on to answer a broad essay question on American politics in the test’s last half-hour.
As I left the consulate, I couldn’t help but wonder at the way the written test was structured. This was the one opportunity the State Department had to really plumb my knowledge of America and the rest of the world, and they spent most of it asking me about things like sentence structure, how to be a better boss, and whether I had experience using a phone.
Later, I asked Myles, the recruiting chief, about the management questions I had encountered. (I interviewed Myles several months after taking the test and didn’t inform anyone at the State Department I intended to write about the exam before I took it.) “Foreign Service officers have to have management skills early in their career,” she explained. “An entry-level hire could have significant-size staff to deal with in a given embassy.”
Yes, but: Setting aside the question of how nailing six or seven multiple-choice questions proves I’m ready to manage employees, should diplomats be selected for their management skills, or for their ability to craft and implement effective foreign policy? Does it make sense to use the same test to hire managers as public diplomacy officers?
A Staff of Swiss Army Knives
A few weeks after taking the test, I got an e-mail asking me to download my results. “Congratulations!” it read. “Based on a comprehensive review of your complete candidate file, you are invited to participate in the next step of the Foreign Service Officer selection process: the Oral Assessment.”
The closest test center is in Washington. As of this writing, I’m not sure I’ll make the flight—and not just because this article probably burned whatever chance I had at a career in public diplomacy. My experiences with the FSOT made me doubt whether the State Department’s hiring philosophy is likely to create the Foreign Service we need to cope with an increasingly complicated, resentful world.
The Foreign Service needs to be flexible and competent, but it also needs to be expert. The test should be a way to find the right tools for the job, not a way to hire a staff of Swiss Army knives. Analyzing the implications of local elections, deftly answering tough questions about U.S. policy and culture, negotiating trade deals, or even helping Americans in trouble thread their way through foreign legal systems—these are jobs that require specific, significant expertise and training.
I’m sure many will say it’s not fair to judge the Foreign Service by one test. But the Foreign Service is particularly susceptible to this sort of judgment—because the test (and a background check) is the only requirement of employment. In the end, I think the people who get hired are probably very qualified to do the job they’re asked to do. I just think they should be asked to do more—and the test should reflect that.
If the United States were willing to invest more time and money in training, these questions might not be so pressing. German diplomats, for example, spend a year in a sort of Foreign Service boot camp and are expected to speak fluent French and English before being posted abroad. American diplomats typically get seven weeks—most of it spent learning rules and regulations, not economics or political science or history or even management skills—before they’re thrown into a consular job somewhere overseas.
That’s not good enough. In 2006, Secretary Rice’s plan for transforming the Foreign Service included “preparing our people with new expertise and challenging them with new expectations.” But the test I took can’t select candidates with the foreign- and domestic-policy knowledge needed to start the job cold. As a new administration takes a look at changing how America represents itself abroad next year, the FSOT might be a good place to start.
