Think you have what it takes? Test your brain with quiz questions pulled from the State Department’s own sample exam.

For years, the State Department has been the redheaded stepchild of the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus. Chronically underfunded and outmuscled in bureaucratic turf wars, State has had trouble convincing Congress to give it more resources and clout.

In a 2006 address at Georgetown University, Condoleezza Rice sought to change that. The secretary of state called for a new role for the department, a sweeping vision she dubbed “transformational diplomacy.” “When the very terrain of history is shifting beneath our feet,” Rice said, “we must transform old diplomatic institutions to serve new diplomatic purposes.”

Since then, State’s fortunes appear to be on the rise. In February, Rice announced plans for the largest one-year hiring increase in the history of the Foreign Service—the culmination of months of hard lobbying and planning. President George W. Bush’s budget for fiscal 2009 calls for the hiring of nearly 1,100 new diplomats as well as 300 U.S. Agency for International Development personnel and a “Civilian Response Corps,” experts who can deploy to help failing states on short notice.

State, in other words, is finally going to get the human capital it desperately needs. Or is it? Starting with how State plans to transform one of its oldest institutions, I decided to find out for myself: I took the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT). What I found changed the way I think about the future of the Foreign Service—and not for the better.

So You Want to Be a Diplomat?

If you’re an U.S. citizen, the FSOT is the only thing standing between you and a career as a U.S. diplomat. The test is the State Department’s sole criterion for choosing diplomats. In theory, it’s a truly merit-based system. It doesn’t matter if you are a 21-year-old two months shy of college graduation or a 51-year-old law firm partner in the middle of a midlife crisis. Everyone has an equal shot.

Candidates who score above a certain threshold get put on a list of potential hires, ranked according to their results; bonuses are given for military service and proficiency in strategic languages. The test is used to select all of America’s career diplomats, from the managers responsible for keeping the embassies running, to the consular officers who decide who gets to visit the United States and who doesn’t, to the public relations experts who are the country’s public face abroad, to the political officers negotiating with foreign governments. (The bar is just lower for managers and consular officers.)

It’s hard to imagine a more coveted government job: In a 2007 survey, American undergraduates rated the State Department the fourth-most desirable employer in the country, just behind the private-sector dream team of Google, Disney, and Apple. (The Central Intelligence Agency ranked sixth, after the Peace Corps.) In 2006, more than 17,000 people took the FSOT. Just 10 percent passed the written exam, and a fifth of those made it through the daylong oral assessment that follows. In the end, less than 3 percent of all applicants were offered a job in 2006. That’s an acceptance rate significantly lower than that of Harvard Business School.

Given the rigor of the process, you might think that State is looking for the next generation of foreign-policy thinkers. But you’d be wrong. As I discovered, the test is as much about management jargon and decision-making under time pressure as it is about knowledge of things international.

The exam’s creator may have a lot to do with it. As part of State’s recruiting and hiring push, a new FSOT was unveiled last fall. The test and hiring process was designed with expert help from management consultant McKinsey & Company. In a dramatic shift from the philosophy that has guided the test for the last three decades, McKinsey recommended that things like personal background and experience be part of the selection process.

The FSOT is one of State’s most venerable traditions. It has been offered in one form or another for 72 years. For its first 30 years, it served mostly to keep State looking very much like its secretaries—WASPy and wealthy. The test was only offered in Washington, barrier enough for potential applicants who couldn’t afford to travel.

That all changed in the 1970s. In response to a series of discrimination lawsuits, the State Department brought in industrial psychologists to radically reform the exam. Questions about background and experience were banned because they could be used to probe for school ties or sift for the “right sort.”

The so-called oral assessment, an interview and simulation exercise to which only people who passed the written component were invited, was likewise stripped of any personal element. One former examiner told me that when he started giving the test, applicants sometimes tried to slip helpful résumé details in during their interview—their recent Peace Corps stint, say, or travel to some exotic land. They were given a warning and then could be ruled “out of order.”