3 ms·
So then what do you make of the studies that show that SATs are culturally biased, like the one OP posted [1]. I decided to go ahead and buy it for the 10 bucks
by Kranar 5y ago
So then what do you make of the studies that show that SATs are culturally biased, like the one OP posted [1]. I decided to go ahead and buy it for the 10 bucks and review it. It's a surprisingly technical study that seems fairly robust and it has been replicated several times (original study in 2003 and replicated in 2010).
The findings are that much of the disparity between minorities and whites goes away for harder analogies that are more technical or scientific in nature, in fact contrary to what I expected, the recommendation of the study is to simply eliminate the bottom third of verbal questions (ranked by difficulty) involving analogies or sentence completion, as those are the questions that are most likely to involve cultural bias.
If my understanding is correct (and I'm sure I have some subtle details wrong), the idea is to let students take the SAT, then go over the verbal/analogy/sentence completion portion of the SAT and order each question by the proportion of white students who answered it correctly, and then eliminate the easiest of those questions from the final score. The most difficult questions are still part of the test, but apparently most of the cultural bias is among the easiest questions to answer that minorities get tripped up on.
If your hypothesis were true, that it's mostly a matter of bad parenting, it's kind of hard to see why bad parenting would make minorities struggle to answer the easiest questions for white people, but not also struggle to answer the hardest questions as well.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/new-evidence-racial-bias-sat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/new-evidence-...
- rayiner 5y agoWhy would there be a Black-white gap (two groups that come from the same American culture) but not an Asian-white gap (two groups that come from different cultures)?
- tptacek 5y agoBlack and white families are not in fact part of the "same American culture". And, of course, it's not the case that Asians uniformly outperform white subjects on the SAT; "Asian" comprises many different cultures, and not all of them are empirically advantaged in America.
- xyzzyz 5y agoThe racial gap is almost exactly as big on the SAT Math as it is on Verbal. Do you think SAT Math is also culturally biased? If so, do you think it is exactly as biased as Verbal? That is, why is the Math gap not, say, half the Verbal one, if the cause for disparities is cultural bias?