As kids head back to class, Amber Ruffin schools viewers on the racist legacy of the SATs
Ruffin also shared the happy news that The Amber Ruffin Show will be back for a second season
TV News Ruffin
The Amber Ruffin Show wrapped up its eventful and deceptively chipper first season on Friday. Or we should say, “eventful, deceptively chipper, and very successful first season,” as host Amber Ruffin and sidekick Tarik Davis led a show-opening audience singalong to celebrate the just-announced news that this Friday night Peacock entry into the late-night wars is coming back for a second full season, starting on October 8. Let’s all join in! “Amber Ruffin, say Amber Ruffin, Amber Ruffin…”
Well, now that Ruffin and we have gotten that out of our systems, Ruffin went on to one of her signature “How Did We Get Here?” segments. And, with all those school kids trading their Zoom screens for in-person learning once more across the country (except in states whose governors are clearly part of some COVID-worshipping, child sacrifice cult), Ruffin leapt ahead to the ever-looming specter of standardized testing, particularly the SATs. Or, rather, Ruffin zoomed ahead by looking back at how that bubble-coloring, one-standard-fits-all standardized test is super-racist, and has been, right from its inception.
How racist? Well, as Ruffin explained while tracing the gradual adoption of standardized testing in the 1920s, let’s look at SAT founder and spiritual father (seriously, Ruffin showed a picture and he looks like a particularly judgmental ghost), one Carl Brigham. The Princeton University professor came up with a supposed intelligence test under the self-professed dictum that the “Nordic race” will lose its innate (to him) superiority in the brain game since, well, we’ll just use Brigham’s entire quote. (“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro.”) Not much wiggle room there.
Yeah, that’s some bullshit. But, Ruffin asked, how could a test used a century removed from Brigham’s bigot ass still be biased toward whites and against literally everyone else? “When a bunch of white people design a test around the things they know, then they are, by definition, designing a test that white people will do better on.” You know, since, as Ruffin explained, white people—shockingly—seized upon the newly created “intelligence tests” to determine everything from which immigrants got to enter the United States (white ones), to reinforcing the need for segregated schools, to a whole bunch of other stuff that’s straight-up so Nazi-adjacent that she’d be accused (by white people) of making it up if she didn’t have the documentation.
Then there’s the adoption of the SATs to determine who got into college (Harvard being the first one in line), thus perpetuating the denial of generational wealth and higher education to exactly the sorts of people Carl Brigham figured his test would. And how the evolving SATs are traditionally were only changed to weed out the questions Black and Latinx students did best on, which, again, is so insidiously evil Ruffin (and we) can only steer readers toward the research. “The goal of these tests was never education, it was always exclusion,” concluded Ruffin, sending kids and parents back to school with plenty to think about. Beyond, of course, whether or not Republican death-fetishists are turning those schools into incubators to feed their dark, child-devouring COVID-god. Welcome back, kids. Good luck.
73 Comments
Sounds like Ruffin’s done it again! Ha ha. Ruffin is a dynamo!
Uh…what?
What’s the matter? Not enough posts about Jimmy Fallon’s latest hi-larious spoofs and goofs? (Fallon’s probably not even on the air right now. I don’t fuckin’ know. My point is: I wouldn’t know Ruffin’s show, which seems entirely worthwhile and necessary, existed if not for the AV Club. Honestly, I’d rather hear about this show than about a known quantity like Fallon or even Seth Meyers. So, uh, you know… sit on it, Potsie.)
Yes, she has her own show (renewed for a 2nd season) and writes for others. Pretty much the definition of a dynamo.
Sure, she kind of sucks. But I just think of how much her entire existence must bother racists and it makes me glad she has a show, and that AV Club is shilling hard for it, pretending she’s funny, the whole deal. At least it’s not another article about some asshole’s tweet.
Look, I have it on good authority from people who score very well on standardized tests that standardized tests are a very accurate measure of intelligence and a nearly flawless predictor of life outcomes.
Hey, basically all of my friends who scored as high as I did are making great lives for themselves. I’m the exception, not the rule.
Truly the jewel in life’s crown.
My SAT scores somehow failed to predict that my first-year college roommate would be a source of nearly unlimited pot and alcohol, leading to… well, the rest is kind of hazy.
My friends and I scored pretty well on either the ACT (myself) or the SAT and while two of them are stay at home parents now, a few others are essentially retired because they are independently wealthy because of their businesses. I saw my IQ test from my high school transcript. I know I was never supposed to see that number. I got my degree and even started grad school but life gets in the way. I’m a professional chef and my knees, legs, and overall body is giving out, and I’m only in my mid-40’s. Part of my thesis was on eugenics, and it’s messed up about how standardized testing is just plain geared towards white folk. It’s a categorically messed up system but it will never change because it is an industry in and of itself.
If it’s geared towards whites, why do Asians and Indians outperform whites? Seems to me it’s geared towards people who bother to put the work in.
And I have it on even better authority that income level, if extraordinarily high and of a history more than 100 years, and descent, especially if white and “Nordic”, is an even MORE accurate measure of racial, I mean REAL intelligence and a truly flawless measure of future success.
Hilarious!
a lot funnier than your sarcastic posts.But then again so is the clap.
I can certainly see a subjective test, like historical trivia or English idioms, designed by one subculture being more difficult (either unintentionally or maliciously) for another subculture. And how using those sorts of tests as a gatekeeping device would re-enforce the dominance of one culture. But the SATs are mostly concrete. A math question is a math question, right? Am I missing something? Is there an inherently racist way of finding the length of the hypotenuse?
I have no skin in this game and don’t care either way about the future of standardized testing, just trying to understand what the issue is here.
I believe there is a question about the intrinsic value of such tests at all. They do not correlate well to performance in colleges and universities.They were a rough “IQ” test up to 1994, but what is that? IQ tests test the skills they test, but don’t necessarily reflect underlying intelligence. And they don’t test ambition or study habits or enthusiasm at all – which are kind of important in higher education.
“ They do not correlate well to performance in colleges and universities.”
Simply, objectively false.
That might be true of the math section, but not so much of the English section, I’m guessing. Even on the math section, story problems could be tilted to favor one culture or another. Then again, the last time I took a standardized test was in 1982.
I’d be curious to see her do the same thing on the ACT, which is the one that I took(and scored in the 95 percentile on). My experience was that those tests, as much as anything, rewarded people who could eliminate wrong answers until there was only one answer left as much as it rewarded people who could actually come up with the right answer. I don’t think I would have scored nearly as high if I actually had to come up with the right answers without a multiple choice. Most multiple choices seem to be set up like this: two answers that are obvious bullshit, one that is a trick, and the correct answer. If you are good at sniffing out the bullshit, you are already halfway there, you just need to be patient enough and willing to closely re-read to sniff out the trick answer.
All of the standardized tests seem to be mostly based on speed. They’re all about how fast you can get those questions answered. How much time you can spend on each section.
The math section (and even the subject tests which they got rid of) are still curious to me in that they only go through Algebra 2 which top HS math students finish their Freshman or Sophomore year which means it’s not even an indicator as to if student has the math skills for a math heavy STEM degree. Possibly because if they even added pre-calculus to the test there would be less perfect scores.
Yeah, that’s part of why I did so well. The ability to narrow the answers down quickly is key. If you can identify the obviously wrong ones in an instant, sometimes you don’t even have to work the problem all the way through to eliminate the last wrong answer. I’m great at checkbook math, but I flunked Algebra II, but you couldn’t tell by the test scores, because it’s not really about knowing the right answer, it’s about eliminating the wrong answers.What those tests really measure is ability to take multiple choice tests. I was always in the 95-98 percentile in any standardized test, but my GPA was barely over 2.0 in high school and college, mostly because of some brutal fails in English and Math classes.
A famous example was an SAT question that incorporated the word “regatta.” If you happened to be an upper middle class WASP you’d probably know that word. If you came from a different background you might answer the question incorrectly because of it. That’s only one example but I guarantee there were others.
My 7th grader last year encountered this question (not SAT but similar state-mandated test):chapter:book :: movement:______(the answer was “music”.)
Like, that was a question that would have been tricky when I was a kid in the early 80s for everyone but the most academic or upper-middle class. Now? Forget about it. How many kids go to classical music concerts today? (And even that wouldn’t do it, because classical music programs don’t refer to “movements,” they just call the movement by its speed, e.g., “Adagio.”)That question is basically for kids who play classical music, which is for sure a class/race identifier. My kid actually plays double bass, and even he didn’t know it, because his orchestra teacher focuses on music the kids know and enjoy.The next question required knowing what “laminate” means. I was shocked.
It’s a trick question because no one decrying them has any other answer than to eliminate testing entirely. No testing, no writing essays, no looking at high school grades; none of that. Primarily tricky because, even for a perfectly level playing field (never happens) however you divide populations it will soon occur that whatever criteria generated the minority selection among those populations, those minorities will not get the same attention as the majority – if for no other reason than economy of scale. So for math – rich people don’t need their high-school children to work a job from 4 pm to midnight to help put food on the table. Instead their children are studying math. That sort of thing. If that lower-income student, hard-working and dedicated but with no study time, gets to college, the college may spend a disproportionate amount of resources in bringing that student up to speed, possibly losing a year of college level education to make up for a missed high-school level of education.After that it’s all beliefs. Does one believe that low-income students can afford up to $200k in debt? Does one believe that all education should be free? Does one believe that if only for a college degree low-income people would have generational wealth? Some things are correlated – many are not causative. I mention low-income specifically because no one but the rich care how the rich will do. They will be fine. The best argument for standardized testing is that standardized classes require standardized students to offer the best chance at a cost-effective standardized education. Standardized education allows companies to make standardized choices instead of having a 4 year interview process. They look at the reputation of the school and the grades and degree to cut the list of applicants down. Perhaps the SAT is racist as hell. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are a plethora of study guides and if a person wants to do well the cost of those guides is trivial compared to the cost of college; being unable to pay for the cheapest book before college suggests being unable to pay for that $200+ for each of dozens of one-time-use class textbooks. In short, it’s not impossible to crack the code – the hints are everywhere. And those prep books – shareable, so 10 people can split the price. Being entirely unprepared for college for whatever reason isn’t a good argument for lowering barriers to admission and piling on crippling student debt, even if those reasons are some fundamental unfairness in society.
Part of the disconnect is the questions on the SAT are far less “Calculate a hypotenuse” and far more culturally embedded than one might think. Concrete example: here’s the very first math sample question, from https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sample-questions/math/calculator-permitted/1 :The recommended daily calcium intake for a 20-year-old is 1,000 milligrams (mg). One cup of milk contains 299 mg of calcium and one cup of juice contains 261 mg of calcium. Which of the following inequalities represents the possible number of cups of milk m and cups of juice j a 20-year-old could drink in a day to meet or exceed the recommended daily calcium intake from these drinks alone? Before that makes any sense at all, you have to know what a recommended daily intake, calcium, milligrams, milk, and juice are. Those are all culturally-determined referents, not things applicable across all people everywhere. (Indeed, it assumes milk is something someone wouldn’t be sickened by drinking—common in Europeans, ‘cause we tend to retain lactase production beyond infancy, but less common among everyone else.) And it’s not enough to know all those things if you have time to think about it; the SAT is timed. The subject is also being tested on their ability to pull the math question out of the fog of referents QUICKLY.Intelligence tests are learnable; if you know what test is going to be administered beforehand, you can drill for it. Picking out the fairly simple universal-math-principles question about inequalities from that welter of verbiage above isn’t hard, if you’ve seen a hundred questions like it before. There are real reasons the test prep guys promising 200 point improvements or your money back aren’t going bankrupt.
I’m not going to suggest that there aren’t some culturally biased questions on the SATs – I have no experience with them and wouldn’t presume to say anything. But if your example is the standard for what constitutes cultural bias, then I have to object.
Milk and juice are pretty standard grocery items and I would expect even most people from a third-world country to know what they are (as long as they speak English to a reasonable degree). Millimeters is a world-standard unit of measurement (in a maths test, no less) and if you claim that it’s a culture-specific term then I don’t know how you can’t say the same for, say, ‘hypotenuse’ or literally any other mathematical concept besides the basic operators. The meaning of RDA is pretty self-evident; while the meaning of calcium is a) not important to the question itself, and b) something a student could reasonably be expected to have learned as a matter of basic general knowledge. Whether or not the student likes milk is irrelevant.You’re right that transforming these kinds of word problems into mathematical equations is hard, but that’s a skill that a respectable maths teacher should be teaching to their students. It’s part of the point of learning maths, and if a student can’t do that then that’s an entirely different problem from cultural bias. And those word problems will have to involve certain vocabulary, which should be as culturally neutral as possible, but which also have to reflect a baseline of general knowledge expected of the students (who are all at least US residents, we can infer).
I just think that when we start saying that words like ‘milk’ and ‘juice’ are culturally biased, then the concept has bloated beyond all significance. I’m genuinely not trying to have a go here, but I’m just curious how you would rephrase that question so that it’s still a word problem but without terms that you would consider to be culturally embedded.
First off, no, not all the students are going to be US residents. International students are a thing—and have been important for brain drain, which may or may not be a good thing on a global scale, but sure as heck has been useful for the folks doing the draining.Second, cultural neutrality is impossible. You’re not going to be able to phrase a word problem in a natural language that uses no vocabulary. Believing that the math section of the SAT avoids this because it’s math and math is somehow exempt from cultural context is simply wrong. Then the only question is which culture this particular test favors. In this case, it clearly not only USAen, but also one which corresponds better to the higher quintiles than the lower ones.(Just for fun, for this example we could imagine swapping out “milk” and “juice” for “queso fresca” and “horchata”. This doesn’t get you a culturally neutral question. It gets you one that folks less familiar with Mexican cuisine will still be able to figure out, but it will take them longer. On a timed test, this is a disadvantage. Actually stick that one onto the SAT, and I guarantee you’d hear the howls from here to Tierra del Fuego–even though the math is exactly the same, and the math is what the question is ostensibly about.)More generally, solutions to these problems are not likely to be forthcoming. For the moment, tests that look “objective” are lucrative whether the test turns out to be all that objective or not. Standardized intelligence tests turn out to be lousy predictors of success—while simultaneously being the best tool we have. Just know that a lot of that is just detecting privilege through the back door. I’m sure that old question about regattas correlated EXTREMELY well with success, as people with lots of first-hand experience with recreational boating are more likely to be able to attend school without stressing about resources, and will have better jobs waiting for them on the other side.
On the one hand I agree with a lot of what you say (in theory, at least). But on the other hand… So, I agree that test designers should be mindful of the ways in which – as you say – privilege can sneak in through the back door, and I will even grant you that true objectivity may be impossible – although after a certain point this impossibility exists more as a matter for philosophical discussion and as a kind of reminder to test designers to always be on their guard against cultural biases. I also agree that these standardized tests are an imperfect tool. And I agree that the regatta question is absolutely an example of something that should not be in a test.
What I disagree with is that the question you brought serves as an adequate example of cultural biases within standardized tests, when it is about as devoid of culture-specific vocabulary as one can possibly hope to get within a test. And, moreover, that those terms fall within a pool of widely-accepted general knowledge that a student should reasonably be expected to know by the time they hit college. You can call that cultural bias, if you want to put the finest point on it possible, but I would say that if a student taking a pre-college exam has a problem understanding any of the conceits mentioned in the question you posted then, to my mind, that actually speaks to a flaw within their education, in which case the test is doing its job by posing a challenge to them.
And I will vehemently disagree with the ‘horchata’ and ‘quest fresco’ examples, because – and I’m sure you must realize this – even Mexican students probably learn the terms ‘leche’ and ‘jugo’ before they learn the terms ‘quest fresco’ and ‘horchata.’ Milk, in particular, is one of two drinks in the world that you can be absolutely certain everyone has drunk at some point in their lives (I choose to include formula, here), and juice is not far off from that. It doesn’t get more universal than that. Again, if a student gets to their college entrance exams without being able to grasp the concept of people drinking either milk or juice, then it stops being about cultural bias and starts being about their foundational general knowledge base.
You say that the test privileges USAen… but my question would be that if US English is a problem for you, then why in the hell are you taking this test in the first place? If you’re an international student look to study in an American university, then why are you taking SATs instead of your own country’s national exams? If you don’t know what a millimeter is, then why are you taking a pre-college maths exam?
Apologies if I’ve misread your post – like I said, I agree in the abstract that true objectivity is impossible etc, and I guess it’s possible that you’re just making that point? But your OP seems to imply that an injustice is being committed in that example you gave, and I’m having a hard time working out what exactly that is, or if you actually think that or not.
“Justice” is beyond my pay grade.The main reason I went looking for the sample questions from the actual test was to illustrate that the real questions even for math are significantly embedded in a cultural context, referencing things that are more common in some cultures than others. I’m responding to Robert-Moses-Supposes-Erroneously’s “A math question is a math question, right?” In the United States, we tend not to want to look at class issues. It’s an appealing thought that anyone fluent in English could take a test that honestly will detect whether they’re a good candidate for further education—particularly in the context of a state-subsidized school. It’s a bummer when we note that the actual tools we have available to do this identify the wrong thing.I should probably note that rhetoric about “designed” crosses into conspiracy theory territory. We don’t need to suppose there’s a smoke-filled room full of guys saying, “Okay, how do we tune the SAT so anyone darker than a paper bag will flunk it?” But that’s a thing about structural racism; a system or institution can end up privileging folks even though nobody sat down with intent to create a thing that does that.
I should probably note that rhetoric about “designed” crosses into conspiracy theory territory.What are you talking about in this paragraph? Whose rhetoric? Mine? I don’t know what gave you this impression, but it’s a perfectly appropriate word to use and there’s no ‘rhetoric’ there. Tests are designed. They have to be. They don’t just appear fully-formed in nature. And I don’t need to be told about structural racism, thanks, I know what it is.
The main reason I went looking for the sample questions from the actual test was to illustrate that the real questions even for math are significantly embedded in a cultural context, … and I’m saying that you failed to demonstrate this using the example you gave.For any test item involving vocabulary, we can distinguish between types of vocabulary featured.(1) Words/concepts that a student should be expected to know specifically because they relate to the test.
(2) Words that relate to a baseline standard of general knowledge that a student of high-school graduation age should be expected to know.
(3) Words that may be culturally specific and which certain students could not be expected to know (such as ‘regatta’), and which therefore should be kept to an absolute minimum.
Of the words you cited as being ‘culturally embedded,’ all fall into groups 1 (millimeters) or 2 (milk, juice, calcium, RDI), with zero in group 3. The meaning of RDI is also self-evident. Finally, this is a maths question, meaning the skill that is being tested is precisely the ability for students to ignore the definitions of the words and extract the maths.If I wanted to be charitable to you I could say that calcium might be a little bit more abstracted and could maybe, at a stretch, be put into group 3. I will even acknowledge that some hypothetical terms fitting the bill of group 1 or 2 may also be somewhat culturally embedded. But the purpose of school is partly to iron these differences out – if I come from a culture that doesn’t really use the word ‘calcium’ then I should be learning about the term in school; a process that doesn’t really apply to such terms as ‘regatta.’ In which case, the test is still doing its job.It’s a bummer when we note that the actual tools we have available to do this identify the wrong thing.But this is my point – you’ve provided an example using a question that is, by every metric I can see, identifying exactly the thing it should be identifying. What you’ve actually provided is an example of a very good exam question that’s been thoroughly vetted for culturally-specific terms that might throw off an otherwise intelligent student – something which, in the quote above, you’re implying this particular question might do. The article above, the OP, and your initial response to the OP all center around the issue of racial/cultural bias in tests, and your quote above implies that this quotes is, likewise, flawed. I am arguing that it isn’t flawed, that it is not culturally biased (not without bloating that concept to the point of bursting), and that a question like that probably couldn’t be meaningfully improved upon.As I said before, if all you’re doing is waxing philosophical then that’s fine – sure, there’s no 100% objectively neutral terms to use, etc. But from a pragmatic standpoint, your posts – and the quote above – carry the implication that this is a problem that should be changed, somehow. Which brings me back to my original question: how would you improve this question, while still keeping it as a word-based maths problem? And if you can’t do this, surely you’d have to acknowledge that maybe this isn’t a problem of cultural bias?
You keep talking in binaries; “should be expected to know” and such. It’s a timed test. That it’s possible to answer at least some of the questions faster if you have instant familiarity with the specific non-math terms thrown around the math problems results in measurable changes.Nor should you be surprised by this. It’s not hard to get that different groups are going to be exposed to different terms in different proportions. For a particularly blunt example, “recommended daily intake” is likely going to be thrown around a lot more in a food-secure household than a food-insecure one. (And that’s a weird one for you to think has a self-evident meaning in the first place. Among other things, recommended by whom?)Still, let me cut to the chase, in re: what I think can usefully be done. Forbes just ranked University of California at Berkeley as the best college in the country ( https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/ ), and the UC system gave up on the SAT. ( https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/exam-requirement/ ). So I say (A) the test has evident problems, (B) I don’t think it’s going to be possible to craft a multiple choice standardized test that isn’t too culturally biased to be good at it’s ostensible job, and (C) apparently you can run the best university in the country without using the silly thing in the first place.Hence, I think at this point the best way to improve the SAT is to take the College Board out behind the barn and shoot it.
You keep talking in binaries; “should be expected to know” and such. Nor should you be surprised by this. It’s not hard to get that…And that’s a weird one for you to think has a self-evident meaning in the first place… recommended by whom?‘Recommended’ is an past participle-adjective: it doesn’t require an agent any more than the phrase ‘the broken window’ needs one. ‘Should be expected to know’ is a reasonable enough substitution for ‘should be expected to be comfortably familiar with.’ And I don’t know what you’re talking about with ‘surprised’ since my entire issue, all along, has been with your specific example, and I’ve offered a pretty clear rationale for why the vocabulary of that question doesn’t fall under the category of ‘culturally-embedded’ terms that you describe – a rationale you’ve repeatedly refused to engage with.
And, to be frank: if I keep talking in binaries, then you keep talking in generalities. You’ve spoken a lot, in abstract terms, about cultural neutrality and structural racism and standardized tests and brain drain (all things I know about) and noting their various problems (and I have been actively, explicitly agreeing with your takes on these).
The one issue I had was with the specific example you posted, and the standard that it implies for what exactly constitutes cultural bias in standardized tests – which, despite now thoroughly denouncing, you initially framed as a necessary evil:More generally, solutions to these problems are not likely to be forthcoming[…] Standardized intelligence tests turn out to be lousy predictors of success—while simultaneously being the best tool we have.And whenever I’ve emphasized this you’ve gone back to talking about the general problems – except when you’ve stopped to make off-base criticisms of the entirely correct language I’ve used. I also notice, BTW, that you haven’t referenced ‘milk’ or ‘juice’ again – presumably because you’ve realized that claiming ‘foreigners can’t be expected to understand milk’ isn’t the best look.FWIW, I have no problems with the idea that standardized tests should be thrown out. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree. What I disagree with is the notion that a) the example question you posted was culturally biased, and b) that any vocabulary or that are somewhat unfamiliar to students from a certain cultural context (whether it be race, class, geography, nationality, personal background etc.) are automatically problematic and require removal.You might not have actually been saying b) – but it’s the impression I got, and up until now you’ve resisted my attempts to pin you down on it, which is why I may be coming across as a touch frustrated in this post. I’m glad you’ve finally answer the question but it’s weird that you wouldn’t just say that in the first place. A cynical person might say that’s because you needed time to Google an opinion… either way, I think we could’ve arrived at this point via a less tortuous route, because I think in practice we probably don’t disagree on very much.
So, I agree that test designers should be mindful of the ways in which – as you say – privilege can sneak in through the back doorWell, that’s the whole point of Ruffin’s piece. The test designers for the SATs have long been doing THE EXACT OPPOSITE of that. The original test designer set out to prove that white people were smarter than blacks and other minorities, and the test refinement process was designed to reinforce that predetermined conclusion by removing questions those blacks and minorities did well with. The privilege isn’t sneaking in the back door, it’s the whole point of the test.
I mean, look at this:
Which of the following inequalities represents the possible number of cups of milk m and cups of juice j a 20-year-old could drink in a day to meet or exceed the recommended daily calcium intake from these drinks alone? This language is not designed to be easy to understand. This language is designed to be confusing. In the MATH section.
“Before that makes any sense at all, you have to know what a recommended daily intake, calcium, milligrams, milk, and juice are. Those are all culturally-determined referents, not things applicable across all people everywhere.”But none of that knowledge is required to understand or solve the problem. Abstracting the question is no easier or harder based on the cultural knowledge. As you said, doing questions like these is what is important. Of course if you have had algebra, you should have done a lot of questions like these. I agree that all knowledge tests, including all IQ tests, are tests for which you can study. But the example you cite is not affected by whether you have the cultural knowledge in question.
I should say all knowledge or skills tests as you can study for those as well. I have never seen an actual IQ test for which studying would not have helped.
Checking your past comments, I note that this seems to be, by far, the longest and most involved that you’ve ever written. That’s a bad sign, sir.I am sure that, generally speaking and in deed, you are not racist.That noted, read your comment here in the context of this article. It makes you look really, really bad, like someone who might’ve just written something REALLY racist, and thrown in a reference to “Obummer”, and then ended with “I’m just asking questions here!” – then was smart enough to realize how THAT looked and modified it.As an older white male, I’ve spent the last ten years finding out just how much racism and sexism “American” society has leeched into me entirely and only because it’s been the sea my consciousness has always swum within.This can be a learning moment for you. Really.
The bias is baked into the process:If questions perform well, then they are used on a scored section in the future. If they perform poorly, then they are scrapped. How does the ETS judge the performance of a question?“Each individual SAT question ETS chooses is required to parallel the outcomes of the test overall,” writes Rosner of The Princeton Review Foundation. “So, if high-scoring test-takers — who are more likely to be White (and male, and wealthy) — tend to answer the question correctly in pretesting, it’s a worthy SAT question; if not, it’s thrown out. Race and ethnicity are not considered explicitly, but racially disparate scores drive question selection, which in turn reproduces racially disparate test results in an internally reinforcing cycle.”This discriminatory process is known as “point bi-serial correlation.” According to Rosner, it is “a key methodology used by psychometricians to construct admission tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT and many other bubble tests.”Rosner analyzed a data set of 276 verbal and math questions from the 1998 and 2000 SATs. He found what he calls “Black questions,” in which more Blacks than Whites answered correctly in the pre-testing phase.“But it appears that none ever make it onto a scored section of the SAT,” Rosner says. “Black students may encounter Black questions, but only on unscored sections of the SAT.”Instead, SATs only contain what he calls “White questions,” in which more Whites than Blacks answer correctly in the pre-testing phase. That is the principal reason why Whites consistently perform better. They are supposed to. The questions are literally geared toward them, as test developers are mandated to recreate the norm, the norm of White males outperforming their peers.https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15092463/new-mind-boggling-evidence-proves-sat-biasThere are also some examples of bias in math questions given here
https://www.brown.edu/academics/education-alliance/teaching-diverse-learners/question-iv-0
Gotta object to the term “Nazi-adjacent.” It suggests two things side by side. Eugenics actually ran rampant in the USA first, and then Germany copied it.:(
Someone always forgets to tell Asian Americans that the SAT is designed for White overachievement. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/
We tried to make a test that tested how good a white person a student wasWe never even considered that there were groups who were better at being white people than we were
Please, define “being white” in this context.
Whichever characteristic, or set of characteristics, that are desirable enough to build the SAT around as outlined in the video.Much like obscenity, I can’t define it but I know it when I see it on a standardized test.
Fun fact: the OP defends “free speech” by saying we should protect the speech of fascists who want to eliminate the entire concept of free speech…
Ignoring the fact that this has no bearing on the subject, you may want to stop and think why even far-left groups like the ACLU have historically supported the right of speech even of far-right groups opposed to their values. The argument was basically what he said.
And let’s face it, despite the historical anti-Black nature of the tests, the real reason schools want to get rid of standardized testing now is because Asians (and Asian-Americans) excel at them and not so much the rich white students they want to attract. Without standardized testing, they can go back to admitting students on subjective criteria like “character”. Basically the same thing happened in the first half of the 20th century when Jews started beating WASPs academically.
Keep in mind, the OP defends “free speech” by saying we should protect the speech of fascists who want to eliminate the entire concept of free speech…
I know I am late to the party but yep. Test Prep has some of the lowest bang for your buck in college prep. Get rid of the ACT/SAT and mommy and daddy can spend that 1000-10000 on something that will now bring even bigger benefits from starting the 10 millionth charity on feeding the hungry or paying and having time for niche sports to land that scholarship or even a non scholarship slot on the team to being able to hiring writers to better craft admission essays.
Are Indian students brown enough for you? They tend to score well on SATs as well – when they are smart and work hard at preparing for them. Plenty of African American black kids doing well on them too. Education level and literacy/numeracy level of a student’s parents is by far the statistic with the highest correlation to that student success.Someone in one of the other comments on here mentions that “America doesn’t like to talk about it’s class inequalities”. A big part of the problem is that the people who do see it as a 100% racial issue and/or economic issue. The intelligence gap between the haves and have nots is at least some of the problem.
Says the guy who defends “free speech” by saying we should protect the speech of fascists and bigots who want to do away with the whole concept of free speech…
I love how you claim to love free speech yet you immediately ran to the dismiss button when I pointed out that protecting the free speech of fascists who want to eliminate free speech of marginalized communities is in itself antithetical to free speech… Maybe it’s because you’re a Libertarian douchebag who values “the economy” over human life…
I dismissed it because it had zero to do with the topic of the SAT. Zero. I commonly dismiss replies that are either pointless, or out-of-nowhere insults. Yours are both. But I can’t compete with the amount of time you must have to dig around someone’s comment history. So you win, I’ll keep it up.
I dismissed Lazerdawg’s replies because they were completely off topic, boring screenshots of old, unrelated comments, and contained unnecessary insults. To me, that wastes everyone’s time. If he/she/they have a thought on the SAT, I’ll leave it alone.
This types of arguments always fail because of this fact. If standardized testing is “racist” how do other ethnicities do so well? Even many english as a second language students do very well on the SAT’s. It just comes across as blaming others for your own failures.
“And how the evolving SATs are traditionally were only changed to weed out the questions Black and Latinx students did best on”Please stop trying to make ‘Latinx’ a thing. Most actual Latinos either (a) don’t know the word exists, or (b) fucking despise it. A Latino friend of mine calls it “White lady bullshit”, and he’s right. Latinx is an ugly, artificial, politically contrived, and utterly unnecessary word used exclusively by two groups of people: A very small percentage of Latinos, and a very large percentage of white Woke shitheads. So, stop it!
Who gives a shitx?
I think it comes from English-speakers not realizing that gender in languages is not the same as gender in people
It comes from the LGBTQ Latinx community who coined it and use it as a self descriptor.
So why use a word coined by (and for) a very small minority to describe everyone in a much larger group?
“It comes from the LGBTQ Latinx community who coined it and use it as a self descriptor.” doesn’t mean it’s “a word coined by (and for) a very small minority to describe everyone in a much larger group”.
People can still use the words latino and latina. No one is stopping them from doing so. Stopping people who want to use the word latinx for themselves is just bullyish behavior.
I don’t use it to describe everyone. If someone prefers to be referred to as Latino or Latina I use that. The Latinx LGBTQ community is encouraging language to evolve as acceptance of their community grows and changes. Language always grows and changes as society changes. The term “Ms.” didn’t start to grow in popularity until the 1970s and now it’s common because people preferred it not because it was forced on anyone. Perhaps Latinx won’t be used in the long term. In Argentina, the use of “e” as a gender neutral term has been gaining ground. Perhaps that will ultimately be the more common convention. But the LGBTQ community isn’t going to go away or be erased, and the discussion around how to make society more welcoming for them isn’t going to go away either.
You writing this won’t stop it, so easier for you to just get used to disappointment.
And you don’t care about the fact that most Latinos who’ve heard the term despise it? Why should they be disappointed? Why can’t it be you and your weirdo clique with your silly, made-up words?
You’ve made at least two assumptions with what you just wrote. I just observe reality. The word latinx is out there. Saying “stop it” here won’t change that. Also, all words are made-up.
I’ve mostly heard it from queer and non-binary Latinx folk, but no one is forcing you to use it. It became more popularly used after the Pulse nightclub shooting, where the folks in the Latinx LGBTQ culture that was the target of that crime used it as a self-descriptor.
I know nobody is forcing me to use it. I never will use it, because I know most Latinos have either never heard of it or think it’s incredibly stupid, and I don’t want to insult them.
The biggest problem with the “SATs are racist” argument is that whites don’t get the best grades. Asians and Indians do. How does “White supremacy” explain that?
On average, in the US, how many students are taking the SATs annually? And if the majority of that number, whatever it may be, is white, wouldn’t a test culturally slanted towards whites benefit them literally by design?
It’s not a fair comparison, as Asian/Indian immigrants are frequently wealthy or privileged before they get her. The ones in my town are all professors or in pharma or finance. Their kids go to the same schools as the rich white kids, so they get the same white-forward education (only more so, because they aren’t lazy Americans). By contrast, Latinos and Black kids often aren’t in the same schools thanks to class differences but also red lining and other affirmatively ghetto-izing policy. And geographic differences matter too. A disproportionate number of Black families live in the South (shitty schools) or in urban areas (shitty schools). Furthermore, Asian/Indian parents, themselves products of Confucian or caste-based systems and thus accustomed to dealing with very top-down systems, are fully aware of the fact that colleges prioritize white person stuff; they therefore push their kids to do white person stuff. They know they won’t get white-person-affirmative-action that their kids’ white friends do, so they game the system by prioritizing rich-white-people stuff in their kids’ education. And they often can, due to wealth or other types of relative privilege. This is obviously a massive generalization, but I live in a fancy suburb in NJ with lots of East Asians and Indians, and my kids are involved in a lot of rich-white-people activities (chess, orchestra, math contest, etc.) My kids are nearly always the only white kids other than a handful of Russians and Jews. Of course, that was also true when I played classical music seriously when I was growing up. But I’ve talked to the parents, and they are very aware that their kids are competing with each other, not with the white kids.
So yeah. The tests privilege white people, but Asians and Indians know this and put their kids in very white-forward areas, which they can do due to relative wealth and few of the ghetto-izing issues Black and Latino families face. And the people who make standardized tests have no issue, since the admitting committees at colleges will handicap the Asians and Indians anyway.
The only thing the SATs accurately predict is the income level of the people taking them.
Yeah, none of that is true and she is a loon. All these activists are doing is perpetuating “racism” by basically saying that certain people are too stupid to do well on an objective test and should be given some sort of mulligan.There is no “close enough” in math. You either have it right or it is wrong. If your standard is “close enough” in ten years planes will fall from the sky and things will blow up because they are shoddy. How about these parents start teaching their kids and give them some discipline? Nah
Stay mad, racist. Or maybe google racial bias in math and learn something.
I just googled it and all I found was a couple tweets by really wacky people
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/racist-math-education/524199/https://www.edweek.org/leadership/in-math-teachers-unconscious-biases-may-be-more-subtle-than-you-think/2019/12https://www.brown.edu/academics/education-alliance/teaching-diverse-learners/question-iv-0