The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

me to be more like a basic literacy test than an examination of a prospective Foreign Service candidate. It seems strange to me that in a world of high professionalism everywhere, the State Department requires candi- dates to state their career-cone selection in advance, yet the exami- nation process tests all candidates the same way regardless of the cone selected. My overall oral exam score of 4.00 did not meet the cutoff grade of 5.25. Yet during the interview, I was told that I am ‘overqualified’ for the Foreign Service. The letter from the Board of Examiners stated that “Many successful Foreign Service officers have taken the written exam- ination, and the oral assessment, sev- eral times.” If that is true, the State Department misses some quite qual- ified candidates because not every- one will continue trying after failing the initial round of tests. At the same time, repeated testing of unqualified candidates costs taxpayers significant amounts of money, which could be saved if the right candidates were selected the first time. The State Department can and should do a better job of screening applicants, and improvements might start right on the application page of the State Department Web site. The page does not allow applicants to enter all the various information about themselves that might be important for evaluating whether they would be successful Foreign Service officers (e.g., foreign experi- ence, knowledge of more than two foreign languages, education in inter- national economics for an economic cone, various achievements in sci- ence, etc.). Better-formulated questions on the biographical part of the written exam would give wider ground to evaluate candidates’ real knowledge N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 L E T T E R S u