The SAT and Black Students Don't Mix

A 2003 study by researcher Roy Freedle confirms what we've suspected for decades: The SAT discriminates against Black students. In an episode of Good Times, "the militant midget," aka Michael Evans, rebelled against a standardized test because it discriminated against poor blacks. How? The way it designed questions. Freedle's study examined varying ethnic groups that scored at the same level on the verbal portion of the exam. Freedle found that African-American students did better on harder questions with less-common words and worse on easier questions with common words that had multiple meanings. He theorized that this was due to racial and class upbringing. If the SAT doesn't take that into acount, then how accurate is the test design and what does it really reflect? Perhaps it isn't someone's aptitude after all, which is exactly what Michael Evans said.




The College Board should stop reflexively denying the research of Roy Freedle and seriously investigate whether the SAT is biased against African Americans and other minorities. If the test is indeed biased, it needs to be fixed or scrapped altogether.

Freedle published a paper in 2003 that looked at the results of varying ethnic groups that had scored at the same level on the verbal portion of the exam. He found that African American students did better on harder questions with less-common words and worse on easier questions with common words that had multiple meanings. Freedle theorized that the simpler words might have had different meanings in white middle-class neighborhoods than they did in more minority and underprivileged communities.

Jay Matthews of the Washington Post writes:

Simpler words tended to have more meanings, and in some cases different meanings in white middle- lass neighborhoods than they had in underprivileged minority neighborhoods, he concluded. This, he said, could help explain why African American students did worse on questions with common words than on questions that depended on harder, but less ambiguous words they studied at school.

On average, he said, black students were performing only slightly above matched-ability whites on hard questions. But
averages did not submit applications to colleges. Individual students did. Some of those individuals, he discovered, would have gotten a boost of a hundred points or more on the SAT if the score was weighted toward the hard items. He proposed that the College Board offer a supplement to SAT scores, called the Revised-SAT, or R-SAT, which would be calculated based only on the hard items. This, he said, would "greatly increase the number of high-scoring minority individuals."

Now, eight years later, two researchers have confirmed some of Freedle's findings. The results of their study have been published in the Harvard Educational Review.Maria Veronica Santelices of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley say that the "SAT, a high-stakes test with significant consequences for the educational opportunities available to young people in the United States, favors one ethnic group over another."

"The confirmation of unfair test results throws into question the validity of the test, and, consequently, all decisions based on its results," they added. "All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance -- and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success -- appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge."

Freedle offered a possible solution to the bias he found on the test. He suggested that supplemental scores be released showing how well minorities did on the harder questions.

The SAT can be a gateway to opportunity. Students who do well on the test have access to the best colleges and universities, scholarships and other activities. Do poorly on the test, and opportunities are limited.

Aside from the type of bias that Freedle researched, the ability to pay for the expensive review programs that most top-scorers take is another issue in how well minority students perform. That's why admission to college should never be based solely or heavily on standardized testing alone.

There are varying types of intelligence. Some students, regardless of color, simply are not good test takers, and conversely because you are a good test taker doesn't mean you're a good student.

Since the SAT is a money-making enterprise, though, the College Board, even as a nonprofit entity, has an inherent interest in protecting it. In 2006, it reported assets of more than $464 million and paid the president of the organization more than $600,000.

The College Board called the new study "fundamentally flawed" and "wrong and irresponsible and a disservice to students, parents and colleges." The College Board also says it plans to publish a criticism of the paper.

What's a disservice for student, parents and colleges is for the College Board to not more seriously investigate the findings of these studies. While the College Board spends time refuting the study, maybe the NAACP or some other civil rights organization should gather a team of lawyers to consider that legal challenge.