A new study supports research from 2003 showing just how culturally biased the SAT is against African American students, for whom the Reading score was 99 points behind the average for white students. The research shows just how that might be as well: The African American students performed worse on the questions the test deems easy, perhaps because they are common usage words students absorb rather than learn. They are the kinds of words that might take on different meanings in different communities. African American test takers actually performed slightly better than the average white test taker on harder questions -- those words that are more likely to be learned -- and would benefit by as much as 100 points if the SAT scores were weighted toward giving more points for harder questions.
The College Board, which administers the test, reiterated the position it took in 2003: The test is fair, but society isn't. To be sure, other research has found that income and class explain a lot of the gap between African American students and whites overall. But even when those researchers try to isolate the income effect, the effect of race never quite disappears.
The researchers urge the SAT to adjust to account for this, and the pushback is more evidence of the ways in which we misunderstand institutional racism. No one's arguing that the test writers actively want black students to suffer; what they're saying is this is the effect when a dominantly white, middle-class culture fails to recognize it's own cultural influences on tests that are meant to be objective.
-- Monica Potts
