4 Ways the SAT Is Culturally Biased Against Black Students

The SAT, developed by the College Board, is used to evaluate applicants in most U.S. colleges’ admissions. While admissions officers stress that the SAT is only one of many factors considered in admission, it is an important factor. Because educational standards vary among states and schools, colleges use the SAT as a way to calibrate the veracity of the transcript. Therefore, SAT scores have a measurable impact on students’ admissions. The Test is Constructed Around the Performance of White Males The SAT uses an experimental section to test questions that may be used on future tests. If the questions don’t test well, they are scrapped. If they do well, the questions are placed on future tests. But how do test administrators decide when a question does well? By the performance of white males. Researcher Jay Rosner analyzed 276 verbal and math questions from the 1998-2000 SATs. He discovered what he calls “Black questions,” which more Blacks than whites answered correctly on the experimental sections. These questions never made it onto the scored sections of future tests. Instead, the SAT contains the “White questions." Rosner argues that the questions are geared toward whites, as test developers are mandated to recreate the norm, and the norm is White males outperforming their peers. Rich Kids Do Better According to the aggregate evidence from independent research, students with higher family incomes tend to perform significantly better on the SAT. This is not so much a result of a more privileged upbringing, as some may argue, as it is access to test preparation materials such as coaching programs, according to researchers. Black students predominate in lower-income groups, so they are penalized when their scores are compared to wealthier white students. Black Students Do Better on Harder Test Items, But Aren't Rewarded Researchers such as Roy Freedle, a psychometrician who used to work for the Educational Testing Service, which used to administer the SAT, found that at each level of ability, but particularly in the lower-scoring groups, white students on average did better than Blacks on the easier items, whereas Blacks on average did better than whites on the harder ones. Freedle concluded that hard questions, those that produced more wrong answers, tended to have longer, less common words. Easy questions tended to have shorter, more common words. Freedle thought this was key to the relative success African-American students had with the harder ones. Simpler words tended to have more meanings, and in some cases different meanings in white middle class neighborhoods than they had in underprivileged minority neighborhoods. This, he said, could help explain why African American students did worse on questions with common words than on questions that depended on harder, but less ambiguous words they studied at school. Freedle tried to get the test administrators to weight the test more toward the harder items, but that never happened. The Test Contains Questions That Are Inaccessible to Poor, Black Children Educators often find in the wording and construction of SAT questions a bias toward the life experiences of white middle class kids. This means that students who grow up in poor neighborhoods and haven't had the same life experiences as middle-class white children will predictably do worse on these sorts of questions. Researchers Santelices and Wilson studied the 2010 SAT and found many instances of these sorts of questions, which are known among testmakers as Differential Item Functioning (DIF) questions.

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