James C. Sharf

James C. "Jim" Sharf is an industrial psychologist and expert witness who advises employment attorneys, HR managers, and fellow industrial psychologists on developing, implementing and defending employment selection and performance appraisal procedures that minimize the risk of litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Career
Sharf earned a B.S. in Chemistry from Dickinson College in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from the University of Tennessee in 1970. He was Chief Psychologist at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the mid-1970s, where he drafted the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. He subsequently returned to government to serve as Special Assistant to EEOCs Chairman for whom he drafted the "race norming" prohibition in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
In 1994 he was one of 52 psychometrician signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence,(1)" an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to race and intelligence following the publication of the book The Bell Curve. Sharf has testified as an expert witness on "job related and consistent with business necessity" rebuttal burdens in both State and Federal courts. In 2001, Sharf was retained as an expert by the New York Attorney General's office in Gulino v. NY Board of Education to defend the NY Board of Regents' LAST and NET teacher certification exams. He has successfully defended the validity generalization (VG) of measures of cognitive ability in lower courts (Taylor v. James River Corp (1989); McCoy v. Willamette Industries (2001)). Sharf's validity generalization defense of employment tests measuring cognitive ability was affirmed by the Fifth Circuit's Bernard v. Gulf Oil Corp decision in 1989. Sharf has also successfully defended regulatory challenges to validity generalization brought by OFCCP (TIMKEN) and EEOC (SMECO).
With co-author Frank Schmidt, Sharf defended the validity generalization of ACT's WorkKeys(c) certifying a high-school graduate's verbal, quantitative and problem-solving skills for employment. He has also advised the Council on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools' testing of a foreign graduate's knowledge to obtain an occupational visa and licensure in the U.S. Sharf served four years as industrial psychology's expert writing questions on the licensing exam required to practice in all fields of psychology in the U.S. and Canada. With his top secret clearance, he has represented Black Agents' challenges to promotion procedures at both the Secret Service and the FBI. He recently defended a class action challenging all hiring and promotion decisions at 35 Iowa government agencies. He is developing the National Center for Competency Validation's enterprise-wide, valid healthcare competency models and is advising the American National Standards Institute's credentialing definition initiative.

In 2006, he was awarded the M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) for developing the valid, legally defensible employment tests used by the Transportation Security Administration to hire 50,000 airport security screeners nationwide in 2002 The International Personnel Assessment Council presented the Bemis Award to him in recognition of his contribution to merit and fair employment practices. Sharf is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

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