From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Tue Aug 14 2001 - 10:54:58 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
>In the 1970s there were some serious efforts made to create tests that
>would have no correlations with ethnicity. All such attempts failed,
>I believe. ---Lee
The Bell Curve has pretty strong arguments that IQ tests impartially
measure something that is important in our society.
The Rising Curve (a book which is partly a response to The Bell Curve),
has some plausible claims that what IQ measures is something whose
importance varies from culture to culture.
Many cultures in Africa seem to have use a definition of intelligence that
emphasizes things such as slowness (i.e. deliberation) and respect for
society's ways.
Part of the explanation for the Flynn effect in our culture seems to be a
shift in achievement from things that the verbal part of the SAT measures
to things that IQ tests and the math part of the SAT measure. The Rising
Curve hypothesizes that this is due to increased availability of things
such as video games. I think they underestimate the importance of increased
rewards to professions that require analytical skills.
>Spike wrote
>
>> 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
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Free Dmitry Sklyarov! http://www.freesklyarov.org/ http://www.rahul.net/pcm |
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