On SATs and Racism

There was a little bit of discussion near the end of class about the SATS, and I said I would make a blog post about the claim that the SATs are racially biased. While this isn't necessarily directly related to Professor Pitney's question about two students who are in all ways equally qualified with the exception of their background, it is nevertheless relevant as it addresses how we determine who is and is not qualified in the first place.

Here is a link to a pretty good article about race and the SATs. It does a good job of laying out some of the basic issues with the SATs and race. If you only read one of the articles I link to here, you should probably make it that one. It highlights a particularly significant effect of the "pre-testing" aspect of the SAT, in which certain non-scored sections are used to evaluate questions for future use. Because the questions selected for future use are those in which high-scoring students answer correctly, "questions answered correctly by blacks more than whites have been routinely excluded from future use on the SAT. Although questions that whites answer correctly 30 percent more often than blacks are allowed to remain on the test, questions answered correctly even 7 percent more often by blacks than whites have been thrown out." I would suggest reading this article, which speaks further to the issue of "black" and "white" questions and the problems associated with pre-testing questions for use on the SAT.

In this blog post, the author references a book of essays on the subject, entitled SAT Wars, and also touches on the less talked-about gender bias of the SATs, in which "the math portion of the test is 'male-leaning,' citing data from 1998 and 2000 which found that men performed better than women on 97 percent of math test questions whereas women performed better than men on only .8 percent of them." In SAT Wars, one contributor "suggested that the composition of questions is unfair, and that the percentage of questions skewed toward men versus those skewed toward women is unnatural."

This article discusses a phenomenon I found surprising, which is that "at each level of ability, but particularly in the lower-scoring groups, white students on average did better than blacks on the easier items, whereas blacks on average did better than whites on the harder ones. (Whites, however, as a group did better overall.)" However, because there is no weighting of harder questions over easier ones, blacks got no credit for performing better on more difficult parts of the test.

Finally, this article does a pretty good job of speaking to the relationship between SATs, affirmative action, and future success.