Fairness of standardized tests questioned

By Shauna Mecartea
Daily Bruin Contributor

UC President Richard Atkinson’s proposal to abandon the
SAT I in the admissions process to increase accessibility for
students of all backgrounds is continuing the debate over whether
the test is biased.

The SAT, administered and produced by the Educational Testing
Service, is used by colleges nationwide to predict first-year
college grades.

But the SAT inaccurately predicts college achievement among
women and minorities, according to Robert Schaeffer, director of
public education at Fair Test, an advocacy organization dedicated
to ending the abuses, misuses and flaws of standardized
testing.

White college bound seniors scored an average of 1058 on the
SAT, while African Americans scored 860 ““ the lowest score of
ethnic groups surveyed, according to a study done by The College
Board, which contracts the creation and administration of the test
to ETS.

Families with incomes of $80,000-$100,000 scored 172 points
higher on average than families with incomes from $10,000-$20,000,
according to the study.

Additionally, women perform better than men in high school and
college, but score 40 points lower on the SAT, according to Fair
Test.

But ETS says the test is designed to be completely unbiased,
said Tom Ewing, a spokesman for ETS.

The test questions are created by a panel composed of people
from many racial and socioeconomic backgrounds whose goal is to
make as many applicable questions to all groups as possible, Ewing
said.

After the questions are written, they go through a sensitivity
review which removes any question that could be slightly biased,
Ewing said.

Although he assured the SAT’s fairness, Ewing cited
factors such as family income, number of parents in the home and
high school credibility as reasons for the discrepancies in
performance.

The “superficial kind of bias (in the SAT) has been
eliminated over the last decade,” Schaeffer said.

But Schaeffer said the overall format of the test systematically
underpredicts the achievement of women and minorities in
college.

Fast-paced, strategic guessing is a style more associated with
white males. The speed of the test affects bilingual students and
women, Schaeffer said.

An example is the use of the word “arena” which
means sand in Spanish. When bilingual students encounter it on the
test, it takes extra time to identify which context it’s
being used in.

“It is biased in the sense that life is biased,”
said Meredith Phillips, an assistant professor of policy studies
and sociology and co-editor of “The Black-White Test Score
Gap.”

Efforts have been made to make SAT prep courses more available
to students of low-income families, said Seppy Basili, vice
president of learning and assessment at Kaplan, Inc., a SAT
preparation company.

Students who pay the several hundred dollars to take SAT prep
courses will do better on the test, Basili said.

While Atkinson has said dismissing the SAT will help low-income
and minority students enter the universities, Ewing disagrees,
“You don’t cure a fever by throwing out the
thermometer.”

MINORITIES, POOR, WOMEN SCORE WORSE ON SAT
While Educational Testing Service asserts that the SAT I itself is
not biased, they recognize that social and environmental factors
contribute to the discrepancies of test scores. SOURCE:College
Board Original by MAGGIE WOO/Daily Bruin Web Adaptation by HERNANE
TABAY/Daily Bruin Senior Staff