NEWS: SAT : Racist/Classist as _______ : Fucking Bastards

CULTURE: SAT : Racist/Classist as _______ : Fucking Bastards

The College Board is demanding that FairTest, an organization critical of The College Board’s SAT, remove an online dataset that shows that minority and poor students score lower on the SAT than rich and white students. The College Board’s demand states that FairTest “violated copyright law” when they posted the data.

FairTest and other organizations, including The New York Times, are interested in why The College Board has decided to take action to protect its copyright when the data produced with respect to the SAT and ACT has been examined and published for the last 20 years.

Let us now think of the many reasons why The College Board blows/kicks ass. You'll have thirty minutes.

Pencils up. Let's begin.

This should get the eugenics crowd riled.

I hated the SAT. It sucked. I hadn't seen most of the words on the verbal before. And I received SAT prep help at my high school. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I went to a lesser school in the state I grew up in.

Ahh to be Canadian and to NEVER have to take an SAT...

I don't think it's a racial bias so much as a bias against those who are, because of poverty, more likely to grow up in shitty homes in shity neighborhoods, with fucked up families and fucked-up and under-funded schools, surrounded by, shall we say, not the most encouraging environment toward academic achievement.

If you took any black or latino kid, put him in a good, stable home in a decent neighborhood, sent him to the same adequately funded schools that white kids go to, and encouraged him just like you do white kids, you wouldn't see this kind of desparity.

That's the real story, in my opinion.

No thats not true. I grew up in a stable home. stable neighborhood went to a great prep school and still FUCKED up on the SAT. So no its not that. I also was a great student.

Actually, it is true, or, at the least, your personal anecdote, or a hundred like it, do nothing to disprove it. Because we're talking about averages here.

So their argument is that everyone should get the same score, regardless of actual knowledge? If anyone should be blamed here (other than the students) it is the school systems for allowing minority and poor students to get a substandard education. It's not like they deduct points on the test if someone shades in a circle other than caucasian. Perhaps it would help if they issued different tests for the different races and classes? After all, educational segregation has been SO popular in the past.

Also, I didn't know there were enough of us on this site to make a crowd.

^^^ Yeah, that is your individual case. Statistically though...

Are people really blaming the SAT? It's the school systems. Rich white kids get better educations than poor black kids. They also tend to have a more positive attitude towards learning, and attend school more often. Not because they are white, but because they are born into a culture where it is easier to see a future for themselves through education.

There is also the fact that rich kids have easier access to college, so they probably care more about required entrance exams.

[Edited on Dec 04, 2004 by Brinstar]

I think that's what it boils down to. Correlation does not imply causation, and this is a prime example of lurking and confounding variables.

Statistics like these are pretty worthless, because they don't decouple the variables.

Guess what! The distribution of incomes across each ethnic group varies widely. Also, the distribution of ethnicities across each income bracket varies widely. So without some further information (for example, among all the students with family income 50k-60k, what is the distribution of scores relative to ethnic group?), we can't make many precise statements. At best, we might be able to say "it is either racist or classist".

The data that FairTest offers is cute, but not terribly informative.

With that said, if the test is racist or classist, is there a way to neutralize it? Or must we abandon all standardized testing?

Oh, and I agree with Keith. Anecdotes notwithstanding, people who live in higher-income families tend to live in areas that have higher property value, and thus go to better-funded schools. Also, at some income level (depending on location), the cost of private tutoring stops getting in the way of putting breakfast on the table.

Gee, now I wonder why rich white kids would possibly have an advantage over poor and minority kids? Could it be that the rich white kids go to expensive private schools, or incredibly well funded public schools?

I think it's fucking idiotic that people actually believe the SAT is racist. I'm a white male who scored in the ball park of fourteen hundred. I went to a high school that was, quite literally, the worst high school in the whole of the San Antonio Metro area (this is a city of almost two million people). Did I score better then most everyone else at my school cause I'm white? No fucking way. I scored better because I liked to learn new things in school, so I paid attention when I was sober enough to understand and bored enough to go to class.

If anything, the divide comes down to money. I went to a school that was 80% Mexican, mostly second-generation, and I'll tell you that you give most of those kids hope, give a real chance to do something with their lives, and they'll surprise the hell out of you. The big problem in my area is apathy - they're in the barrio, can't get a good job, can't get a break anywhere, so they stop caring.

It sure is great

Well, there's always the basics, like increasing the quality of education that lower-income kids get and making sure that the tests are as culturally neutral as possible. That won't eliminate all the disparities though.

There's also the issue of "stereotype threat" to consider. Basically, if people belong to a group that's stereotypically believed to be less intelligent, the extra stress this produces on intelligence-diagnostic tests can interfere with their performance. The best solution here would be to either change the stereotypes or try to get people to perceive the SAT in a non-diagnostic way.

Ha! "perceive the SAT in a non-diagnostic way", yeah right that'll be the day. Still, just knowing about the existence of stereotype threat and similar mental processes is one of the best refutations to the eugenics crowd. It provides an empirically-verifiable explanation of how women and minoritys can get lower scores when income is controlled for without resorting to inherent differences in ability, and if more people understood that it would result in a lot less prejudice.

Of course a lot of the stereotype threat research was done by whites or men, so it's unfortunately quite racist and/or sexist in and of itself, right chris? (I keed, I keed)

Yay Canada!

Ok, that said...I've never seen an SAT test but I have had the opportunity to consider the problems of standardized testing and one of the major stumbling blocks is just this. When a test is designed by a bunch of old school folk, it tests the skills considered important by said folks. If, for example, the unhappy test-taker does not subscribe to the same set of values, nor does the culture the test-taker was raised in value these skills, then he or she may not have developped them (as much) and get a lower score than people of equivalent intelligence but who belong to the same cultural group as the test-writers. Imagine asking an Australian who the mayor of New Jersey is, and then penalizing her because she doesn't know.

But then I'm not much of a fan of standardized testing, obviously.

That's is exactly what I was going to say. IT's jsut the plain truth.

Fuck the SATs. I never took them because I felt that they were discriminatory. It's about time that they get exposed as such.

You're absolutely right, as a strong predictor of college success, the SAT discriminates against people who don't know (or were never taught) fairly basic language and math skills. That is its purpose. The fact that lower SAT scores are correlated with minorities and poorer people, as populations, does not reveal injustice in the test, but rather injustice in the distribution of educational resources in America. That, and the near total lack of intellectual curiosity in the modern American ethic. I think it is seriously sad that kids are scoring so poorly, because it’s a clear indication that our educational system, our local and national policy makers, and individual communities, are failing to provide children with the skills necessary for academic success. The quality of our public education should be especially troubling for all of us because our leaders are betting the farm that we can stay ahead of outsourcing and rapidly developing economies in the Far East by maintaining dominance in the educationally-based “creative economy.” Not a very good bet when India is graduating 5 times as many engineers as we are, and apparently our kids can barely break 1000 on the SAT.

The way to raise everyone's scores on standardized tests is to keep the Republicans in power. When I was in high school during the Reagan years, they cut a bunch of our programs and classes and then pretty much taught us what we would need to score well on the ACT. My high school kicked ass on the ACT!

Of course, many of us wound up back in the ol' home town, taking classes at the local junior college to beef up our GPAs, after the first or second semester of college, but we KICKED ASS on the ACT, Baby!

Hell, I still do really well on standardized tests, and I can't remember half of the science and mathematics watchamacallits I learned back in the day. Perhaps there's a favored mindset or knack to scoring that they passed along to us during Study Hall/Mass Hypnosis 101.


[Edited on Dec 04, 2004 by fatdavid8]

There was some kind of test we had to take in every odd year, like 3rd grade, 5th grade, 7th grade, etc, and I clearly remember every year the month before the test all learning would stop and the entire time would be spent practicing the test. That was time well spent, I tell you.

That's what happens when funding is tied to how well students do on standardized tests. The teachers will teach the test.

Personally, I don't really think kids need to be taught as many things so much as they need to be taught how to learn, and the will to do so. Teach them to read, teach them mathematics and history, but the entire focus needs to be on HOW and WHY to learn, not WHAT to learn.

For example, in a science class. Instead of lecturing on the achievements of science, how about spending half of the semester learning about the scientific method, and the philosophy of science? I think our learning on the scientific method in high school consisted of one question on a fill-in-the-blank worksheet where we had to put "Observation, Question, Prediction/Hypothesis, and Testing" in the right order. I never once heard the phrase "deductive reasoning" or "skepticism" until I went to college.

But that would teach kids how to ask uncomfortable questions, and that's no good. You don't want your good little worker-drones do too much questioning of the Powers That Be in business, government, and religion, now, do you?

[Edited on Dec 04, 2004 by Keith]

I completley agree with you. I just read a book for a class called The Unschooled Mind and basically this is what the author was saying. That we have a society of degree purchasers that do not actually UNDERSTAND what they are memorizing. As soon as you take someone out of the context of where they learned math, science, philisophy and ask them to apply it to life or something completley out of that contex, they stumble and actually do not UNDERSTAND what it all means. And you are right, there is a reason why this sort of thing keeps perpetuating in our culture- we need so many people to be janitors, bankers, drones, ETC. the educational system itself just keeps fostering the elitist agenda - one giant cycle of privaledge and wealth. Also, I suggest reading Particia McDonough) and her work on Social Capital and students and how that plays into being able to do well in an educational setting. PEACE

Actually, that's NOT true. As a former employee for a testing company (The Princeton Review), the statistics we had for the SAT (and the other major standardized tests) showed that even "wealthy" minorities scored lower on average than poorer whites. I can't site a study because I don't have access to them anymore, but I can tell you that was the data no more than 2 years ago.

Sorry to burst your Classist-But-Not-Racist bubble, but it's absolutely both.

hmmm...hate whitey, hate whitey, hate whitey...but don't pay attention to the little yellow people behind the curtain. Let's just pretend they don't exist, as they totally fuck up the standardized tests are racially biased argument...

or are Asians considered white, now? I guess that would make things easier.

I'm gonna take the SAT in January just to see how I do. I got 1200 something 20 years ago. My verbal was almost perfect, but my math has always been weak. I just can't get into the idea of there being letters mixed up with numbers. I think I have a little better concept of it now!


I'm having my scores sent to Columbia, Harvard, NYU and Multnomah Mortuary College and I'm really hoping I can still fit into those desks.

I'd have to agree w/ Subrosa here, in a sense. However, if you took what Keith said and changed "good, stable home" to "good, stable white home", what Keith said would probably be true. I think the tests play to some extent to white culture, and I'm sure if you acculturated blacks, browns, etc., they'd do better. I knew plenty of black kids in college who were just as smart as I was, but they didn't do as well in school as I did, outside of math and science, because they didn't have a background that had emphasized Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, Shakespeare, etc. They knew Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, etc., instead.

[Edited on Dec 05, 2004 by fatdavid8]