Re: Educational Assessment--SAT I

From: edequity@phoenix.edc.org
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 16:35:32 EST

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    In repy to:
    << I would suggest that you contact TestFair in Boston about Horn's
    findings. They are the "watchdogs" in equity in testing. >>

    Actually it's FairTest, but anyway... Having not seen the Horn article, I
    can't comment directly on that, but I can address some other issues
    mentioned.

    First, and I checked the numbers before writing this, looking back to 1972
    we just don't have the number before that, men have scored higher then
    women on both the verbal and math sections on the SAT every year. The time
    when women did better on the Verbal score was, I believe, was back in the
    sixties, there used to be open ended written responses in the verbal
    section, which females did better on, This was corrected for almost as soon
    as it was notices at males weren't doing as well and they (Males) have been
    doing better on the test ever since.

    This, FairTest argues, is a problem since ETS, the makers of the SAT,
    claims that it predicts first year college grades. However, women make
    better grades then men in high school and college, for whatever reason,
    thus this test is over predicting for about 44%, the actual gender break
    down changes year to year, and under predict for 56% of the test takers.
    Many schools aware of this problem have chosen to either overlook the SAT,
    allowing students to only submit their scores if they want, or taking
    various societal factors into account when considering SAT scores.

    As for readjusting scores to even things out for females, we haven't heard
    about anything like this on the SAT. With the PSAT, the National Merit
    Qualifying Score, the V score was "double weighted," however this didn't
    help women because they score lower on BOTH parts of the test and the gap
    on the math section is larger than the verba; gap. However, as Kathleen
    Rigsby pointed the article mentioned was from 1989-1990 and is now obsolete
    as they don't do this any more.

    Yes, there are gender identifiable and race, identifiable questions on the
    SAT. After many years of criticism that the SAT was discriminatory ETS
    decided to do something about it. They added question that are bias in
    favor of people other then middle-upper class whites. Unfortunately
    standardized multiple choice tests are inherently biased and ETS was/is
    trying to make there test more equitable to all. Of course simply adding a
    few "ethnic" or "female" questions hasn't solved the bias problem. It
    still remains that the factor that has the highest positive correlation
    with SAT scores is parental income and socioeconomic status.

    Jennifer Griffis
    FairTest
    FairTest@aol.com



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