Class Struggle - New evidence that SAT hurts blacksNow, in the latest issue of the Harvard Educational Review, the two scholars who took on that project have published a paper saying Freedle was right about a flaw in the SAT, even in its current form. They say "the SAT, a high-stakes test with significant consequences for the educational opportunities available to young people in the United States, favors one ethnic group over another."
"The confirmation of unfair test results throws into question the validity of the test and, consequently, all decisions based on its results," said Maria Veronica Santelices, now at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley. "All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance--and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success--appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge."
this type of study and the media articles that it spawned are the reason why so many people believe the nonsense about cognitive tests being biased against blacks. as usual, the weakest bit of evidence is given unwarranted weight while the massive amounts of evidence pointing in the other direction are easily dismissed by those who are only interested in promoting a political agenda rather than finding the truth.
Why am I mocking this evidence? because it only involves 2 questions! not only that but the two questions are counted twice because the two years studied both had these two questions. not only that but those same two questions were ignored in different years when they did not show the desired effect! "All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance--and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success--appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge." just because two questions sometimes showed a DIF and sometimes didn't.
the easy explanation to this difference is that the two questions were quite difficult and answered incorrectly by most students and the DIF was showing mostly in weaker students that were likely guessing. random guessing should produce the right answer 20% of the time. if there is a particularly attractive distractor(plausible wrong answer) the actual correct response rate can be less than 20%.
of course we could easily wipe out the racial gap. either make the questions so easy that everyone scores 100% or conversely, so hard that eveyone scores zero.