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.
