8 ms·

>> Test scores are race-blind and fair. Kind of. There is a fair criticism to be made about tests being unintentionally culturally slanted towards the people t

>> Test scores are race-blind and fair. Kind of. There is a fair criticism to be made about tests being unintentionally culturally slanted towards the people that make them, often white Americans. Of course, in this case, your point is correct, since the people that are overindexing on the tests are Asian-Americans.

iosDrone 8y ago
Can you provide some examples of cultural bias? People almost never provide examples. I thought that was always a bullshit excuse, especially considering that these test scores closely track IQ scores.
- aavalle 8y ago
  While the individual questions may be (for the most part) purged of any cultural bias, family income remains the primary demographic correlated with test performance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these-four-charts-show-how-the-sat-favors-the-rich-educated-families/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a95b2a0523d3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these... https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e7a0/dfdee8ad5b91e1d179e9e2e838a4952f00be.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e7a0/dfdee8ad5b91e1d179e9e2...
  - graycat 8y ago
    Of course, a correlation with income is likely a spurious correlation from more basic causes. E.g., suppose a poor family whose kids are doing poorly in school won the lottery and suddenly has high income; do we expect that suddenly then their kids will do well in school?
  - mrchicity 8y ago
    Is that surprising though? There's a strong correlation between pay and intellectual ability/education. There aren't many dull, uneducated engineers, doctors, lawyers, or executives. If intelligence is at all heritable, you'd expect to see this. If educated parents tend to push their own children to become more educated, you'd expect to see this. I wonder what the chart looks like broken down by where parents went to school or some non-financial metric. I would bet the children of well-educated college professors or journalists also score well, despite growing up with a more middle class household income.
  - iosDrone 8y ago
    If you look at the Quillet article someone linked to above, most of the high-performing Asians who ace the SHSAT are low-income, so your generalization makes no sense whatsoever in the context of de Blasio's plan.
confiscate 8y ago
Agree. If a test contains questions that favor a particular race, then that is an outright problem, and schools should stop that. In this case, it's actually the opposite. When a test is in English, often Asians have to learn English, which is often not their primary language at home. So by default, an English-speaking race taking a test, has a HUGE advantage over an Asian test taker. Which is why the stereotype is that "asians are good at math". Asians are NOT particularly good in math. It's just that in math tests, it's mostly numbers. The language barrier becomes less of an issue, the playing field levels out, so you suddenly notice Asians tend to get higher scores. I suspect it would be the same for, say, geography tests, if the same test was translated to an Asian language. Suddenly "Asians are good at geography". Not really. If anything, tests in English are culturally slanted away from Asians where English is often not their primary language.
- icelancer 8y ago
  That is a good point and one I had not considered RE: math and the language barrier. Interesting.
- vixen99 8y ago
  "Asians not particularly good at math"? How does that square with what is well known in published surveys as for instance: "Singapore is routinely ranked at or near the top in global comparisons of mathematical ability and boasts one of the most admired education systems in the world. In a league table based on test scores from 76 countries published by the OECD in May last year, Singapore came first, followed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The rankings, based on testing 15-year-olds’ abilities in maths and science, reinforced a sense that western children were slipping behind their Asian peers. The UK was in 20th place and the US 28th in the table. "

iosDrone 8y ago

Can you provide some examples of cultural bias? People almost never provide examples. I thought that was always a bullshit excuse, especially considering that these test scores closely track IQ scores.

aavalle 8y ago
While the individual questions may be (for the most part) purged of any cultural bias, family income remains the primary demographic correlated with test performance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these-four-charts-show-how-the-sat-favors-the-rich-educated-families/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a95b2a0523d3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these... https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e7a0/dfdee8ad5b91e1d179e9e2e838a4952f00be.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e7a0/dfdee8ad5b91e1d179e9e2...
- graycat 8y ago
  Of course, a correlation with income is likely a spurious correlation from more basic causes. E.g., suppose a poor family whose kids are doing poorly in school won the lottery and suddenly has high income; do we expect that suddenly then their kids will do well in school?
- mrchicity 8y ago
  Is that surprising though? There's a strong correlation between pay and intellectual ability/education. There aren't many dull, uneducated engineers, doctors, lawyers, or executives. If intelligence is at all heritable, you'd expect to see this. If educated parents tend to push their own children to become more educated, you'd expect to see this. I wonder what the chart looks like broken down by where parents went to school or some non-financial metric. I would bet the children of well-educated college professors or journalists also score well, despite growing up with a more middle class household income.
- iosDrone 8y ago
  If you look at the Quillet article someone linked to above, most of the high-performing Asians who ace the SHSAT are low-income, so your generalization makes no sense whatsoever in the context of de Blasio's plan.

confiscate 8y ago

Agree. If a test contains questions that favor a particular race, then that is an outright problem, and schools should stop that. In this case, it's actually the opposite. When a test is in English, often Asians have to learn English, which is often not their primary language at home. So by default, an English-speaking race taking a test, has a HUGE advantage over an Asian test taker. Which is why the stereotype is that "asians are good at math". Asians are NOT particularly good in math. It's just that in math tests, it's mostly numbers. The language barrier becomes less of an issue, the playing field levels out, so you suddenly notice Asians tend to get higher scores. I suspect it would be the same for, say, geography tests, if the same test was translated to an Asian language. Suddenly "Asians are good at geography". Not really. If anything, tests in English are culturally slanted away from Asians where English is often not their primary language.

icelancer 8y ago
That is a good point and one I had not considered RE: math and the language barrier. Interesting.
vixen99 8y ago
"Asians not particularly good at math"? How does that square with what is well known in published surveys as for instance: "Singapore is routinely ranked at or near the top in global comparisons of mathematical ability and boasts one of the most admired education systems in the world. In a league table based on test scores from 76 countries published by the OECD in May last year, Singapore came first, followed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The rankings, based on testing 15-year-olds’ abilities in maths and science, reinforced a sense that western children were slipping behind their Asian peers. The UK was in 20th place and the US 28th in the table. "