Posted on 09/09/2003 5:23:10 PM PDT by shrinkermd
In 2003 the median score for whites on the ACT was 21.7. (The ACT test is scored on a scale of 0 to 36.) For blacks, the median score was 16.9. Thus, on average, blacks scored 13 percent lower on the ACT than whites.
The good news is that while the median score for whites remained the same, the black score increased by 0.1 point. However, the bad news is that the racial gap on the ACT test has been expanding over recent years.The median scores for both blacks and whites had remained the same for three years from 1997 to 1999, at 21.7 and 17.1, respectively. But while the white score has held steady at 21.7, the black score dipped to 16.8 in 2002 before recovering slightly to 16.9 this year. However, the racial gap in ACT test scores remains larger than was the case in 1997.
The nation's highest-ranked colleges and universities seek students who score 28 or above on their ACT test. Nationwide in 2003 only 1,297 black students scored 28 or above on the ACT test. They made up 1 percent of all black ACT test takers. In contrast, 93,068 white students scored 28 or above on the ACT test this year. They made up 11.6 percent of all white ACT test takers. Thus, whites were more than 11 times as likely as blacks to score at a level equal to the mean score of students admitted to the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities.
If we examine ACT scores at the highest scoring levels, we find an even larger disparity. Of the more than 129,000 blacks who took the ACT test this year, not one scored a perfect score of 36. On the other hand, there were 141 white students who received the highest score of 36. Only one black student achieved a score of 35 on the ACT. There were more than 1,100 white students who scored 35 or above on the ACT.
But here is the most discouraging statistic in this year's ACT report: In 2003 more than 87 percent of all white test takers scored at or above the median score for blacks.
The above sentence poses a problem for "diversity" as a legal concept. Essentially, in order to secure diversity one has to ignore fairness.
...and dumb down the higher education process...
Remember, the ACT is an achievement test, not an IQ proxu like the SAT was intended to be. It measures preparation for college, and intelligence only indirectly. Minorities should be much more frightened by ACT gaps than SAT, because it is where they could, by dint of hard work, make up the differences.
Admitting such students will almost certainly result in a combination of (1) failure for the students and (2) degredation of academic standards. For every minority student who scored poorly on standardized tests, but does well in a rigorous academic program, dozens, even hundreds fail and seek less rigorous programs and lower standards.
Excellent! We have succeeded in halting the progress of whites. Now if we can force them backwards, toward greater stupidity, we will have the true equality that we desire.
Of course, these problems are "addressed" by dumbing down the tests (if everyone's score rises, the disparity will decrease, since there's an absolute ceiling on the scores), and by de-emphasizing the test results as a college admissions factor (if you don't get the answer you want, stop asking the question). There was a story out just a couple of weeks ago about my alma mater (UNC) withdrawing the acceptance of a (white) kid who had scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs. He'd let his second semester senior high school grades slide, reducing his overall GPA from 3.8 to 3.5. SATs are a far more accurate measure of ability than GPAs, but they're perceived by some as "culterally biased," and are therefore being de-emphasized as an admissions standard with each passing year. Do you think a black student would have had his admission revoked if he took his SATs a second time, and his score declined? Me neither.
"The very large racial gap in scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) continues to be a major barrier to increasing the number of black students enrolled in higher education. The gap, which stands at about 200 points on the standard SAT scale of 400-1600, or about 15 percent, has been persistent and has even increased slightly over the past decade.
Roy O. Freedle, a retired senior research psychologist at the Educational Testing Service, the company that devises the test questions and administers the testing program for The College Board, has a simple solution. His scoring system, if adopted, would significantly close the racial scoring gap on the SAT. Remarkably, Freedle's solution is to throw out the easy questions on the SAT and retain only the most difficult questions. According to Freedle's analysis, published in the Spring 2003 edition of the Harvard Educational Review, black students do far better relative to whites on the most difficult SAT questions than they do on the easy questions.
ETS regularly assigns a difficulty factor to each question it uses on the SAT. The easiest questions are rated 1 and the most difficult questions are rated 5. However, under the SAT scoring system easy questions count just as much as difficult questions. Freedle's analysis found that if only the 40 hardest questions on the SAT are used to determine the final score, the racial scoring gap would be reduced by at least one third. Freedle's data shows that at almost all scoring levels black students do better compared to whites on the harder questions, but perform less well compared to whites on the easier questions.
For example, Freedle's data reveals that for black and white students who score 640 on the verbal portion of the SAT, black test takers got 69.2 percent of the answers correct on the 40 questions rated most difficult. White students who scored an identical 640 on the overall test got only 68 percent of the most difficult questions correctly. This same discrepancy occurs for black and white students at each scoring level from 200 all the way up to 800. In contrast, when only easy questions are considered white students typically get more correct answers than black students. And this also is true at all scoring levels of the SAT.
Reasons Why Blacks Do Better on Hard Questions
Why do black students do better on the hard SAT questions but perform less well on the easiest questions? According to Freedle, the answer is cultural bias.
For example, Freedle points out that the difficult analogy questions on the verbal portion of the SAT use relatively uncommon words such as "anathema, sycophant, or intractable." These words are not used in everyday parlance among high school students but they are frequently used in an academic setting as vocabulary words. For the most part these words have one distinct meaning and cannot be misinterpreted by any cultural bias. Therefore, black and white students who have learned these words in school will be on a level playing field in trying to answer SAT questions that contain words such as these.
But on the other hand, Freedle says, "It is well known that common words often have many more semantic (dictionary) senses than rare words. Many high-frequency analogy words such as 'horse' and 'snake' have many dictionary entries. Various researchers have hypothesized that each cultural group assigns its own meanings to such common words to encapsulate everyday experience in its respective culture. Thus, individuals from various cultures may differ in their definitions of common words. Communities that are purportedly speaking the 'same' language may use the same words to mean different things... Thus, the cultural and lexical ambiguity that African Americans are hypothesized to experience when responding to many easy verbal items offers one promising explanation for why they do worse. Hard verbal items often involve rarely used words that are hypothesized to have fewer potential differences in interpretation across ethnic communities."
"Snake" May Have a Different Meaning to Black and White Test Takers
Let's look at Freedle's examples of easy questions that could be misinterpreted due to cultural bias. A black student in the inner city may hear the word "horse" used far more often in relation to heroin than a white suburban student who is accustomed to seeing horses in rural pastures. Similarly, a "snake" may be a reptile to a white suburban kid while it may primarily mean a deceitful person to a black kid from the city. In this way cultural nuances can affect how a student interprets what appear to be easy SAT questions using words in common everyday use.
Freedle further argues that only hard questions should be considered on the SAT because results demonstrate the highest level where a student can competently perform. This measure should give college admissions officers a better picture of the type of work a student is capable of completing successfully at the college level. Easy questions on the SAT are comparable to material that is learned in the early high school years or before and therefore do not offer a good indicator of the level of work of which a student is capable.
How would revised SAT scoring boost a black student's chance of being admitted to a selective college? Freedle's calculations show that 0.72 percent of all black test takers are among the top-scoring group on the SAT. But using the Freedle revised scoring formula in which only the most difficult questions are counted, blacks become 2.46 percent of the top-scoring group. Thus, under the Freedle scoring system, the group of black students whose academic qualifications are suitable for admission to the top colleges and universities more than triples.
Those who adhere to a strict merit principle for admission to colleges and universities must admit that an SAT with only hard questions would not violate their criteria for a fair system. All students are being judged equally on challenging academic questions and without regard to race.
Oh, horsesh!t.
(That comment is directed at Freedle, not you, shrinkermd, needless to say.)
As SAT questions become more difficult, luck plays an increasing role. Remember, the answers are multiple choice (or, as we used to call them, multiple guess). If the question is, for example, name the second largest crater on the fourth moon of Neptune, and there are five answer choices, pretty much every ethnic group will answer correctly 20% of the time. Voila, instant parity.
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