Dealing With Bias in the SAT

Taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test has become a rite of passage for millions of American school kids. The path to the middle class lies through getting a college education. And getting into college—especially at a prestigious school—requires a good score on the SAT.

Psychologist Roy Freedle has argued since 1987 that the test is biased culturally against blacks and Latinos. The Educational Testing Service, the people who administer the SAT, have dismissed his work. However, a paper recently published by the [2]Harvard Educational Review [2] [2] will make Freedle’s work harder to ignore. According to the Review:

“By replicating Freedle’s methodology with a more recent SAT dataset and by addressing some of the technical criticisms from ETS, [the authors] confirm that SAT items do function differently for the African-American and white subgroups in the verbal test and argue that the testing industry has an obligation to study this phenomenon.”

This blog post from [3]The Washington Post [3] [3] can help explain the issue more. Also, Teaching Tolerance has explored the issue of culture and standardized testing here [4], here [5], and here [6].

Washington Monthly [7] writer Daniel Luzer says that [7] Freedle and others have suggested fixing the SAT by changing how it is worded. Luzer points out that this would superficially address the issue, but it does nothing to attack the underlying cause. “The trouble with this is that it isn’t actually the SAT scoring that hurts black students so much as it is poor education that hurts black students,” Luzer says. “Adjusting the score wouldn’t fix that problem.”

Education reformers obviously need to tackle both issues—the bias of this critical test and the criminal under-education of black and Latino students.