Biased Tests
People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don’t do well. That’s true–it is biased. It’s biased against people who aren’t well-educated. The test isn’t causing people to have bad educations, it’s merely reflecting the reality. And if you don’t like your reflection, that doesn’t mean that you should smash the mirror.
That quote from a piece in a recent Opinionjournal.com article is bound to rile some people up. My personal opinion is that it is entirely accurate, although I wouldn’t argue this for all standardized tests. Tests have to be methodologically sound, and a lot of variables are tied up there.
The Educational Testing Service, of course, in addition to putting out the SAT’s, puts out the AP exams (I received a 5/5 score on the only test I took, the AP English test), the GREs (whose math section discouraged me from even taking the test), and our very own TOEFL and TOEIC tests. I remember last year, when I attended a presentation sponsored by Oxford University Press on the subject of the new changes to the TOEFL iBT, the presenter, who worked for a test preparation company, said that in terms of English ability, general English books like OUP’s American Headway series were still of immense value for preparatory study.
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Saturday, May 27th, 2006 @ 9:31 pm
I’m typing one-handed: the other is around my son. you should practice this.
I took a ’special populations’ class for my leisure management degree. While trying to teach us WASPs about what it feels like to be a minority and experience rascism, we were given excerpts from an ‘IQ test for urban African-Americans’. I found both the test and the rationale for us attempting the test to be amusing. I scored five out of seven on it.
One question was something like, “What does ‘Mother’s Day’ mean to a pimp? Among the possible answers was “the 15th and 30th of every month”, which I chose. I was right and those dates are when welfare checks are sent. Another question was, “Which word or phrase has the same meaning as ‘Uncle Tom’?” The choices were, a) Hankerchief head, b) a drug addict, c) ??? (can’t remember) and d) all of the above. ‘d’ was the right answer and they are all synonyms for slave.
It’s hard to imagine that the test makers thought these were reasonable questions to ask one specific population group but also amusing that the questions did, in fact, have intelligence-testing answers.
The test was cancelled long ago, by the way.
Sunday, May 28th, 2006 @ 11:06 pm
It sounds like one strange test, Brian. I wonder how long it took you to type that with one hand; I guess I’ll eventually find out!