From: Spike Jones (spike66@attglobal.net)
Date: Wed Aug 08 2001 - 23:25:41 MDT
Brian Phillips wrote:
> It's a statistical fact that the mean for persons who identify as
> African-American on most (arguably virtually all) standardized
> tests are aproximately one standard deviation below those
> the mean of those who identify as white...
So here is the challenge: suppose we wish to design a college
admissions test that would *not* favor one subset of the above
any other. The design constraints are as follows:
1. The test must be performed in a single day.
2. The test must not require a test administrator to assist
the test takers in any way.
3. The test scoring must be completely objective, i.e, no
judges or subjective anything.
4. The test must scorable by machine.
Under these design constraints, what would the test
look like? Would it not look a lot like the SAT?
If the blame for uneven scoring is put on differing
reading skills, is there in theory any way to design
a legitimate test that does away with reading? These
are important questions, for Taxifornia is struggling to
do away with the SAT, claiming that it unfairly favors
a subgroup. They have moved to replace it with a test
that includes a foreign language. This improves the
scores of those who grow up hearing Spanish in the
home for instance, but further reduces the scores of
the poor scorers which have no foreign language skills.
How can colleges legitimately measure and select the
smartest? Can they? spike
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