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To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (4526)	1/23/2003 5:12:49 PM
From: Poet	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 7689

And the correct answer is: E Intesresting news about the SAT. I'm ambivalent about the question's removal. It's a truism that males score higher on math than females. the racial difference is more troublesome though. And I'm sure I would've gotten it wrong.

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (4526)	1/31/2003 9:24:11 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Hi! Got home last night, and have a full few days, heck, weeks, catching up, etc, ahead of me, but dropped by to see what happened to cause so many hundreds of posts to have been generated here since my last peek in, and came across the SAT discussion, which is so interesting and complex, and to which I have no answer. W/o reading all the exchanges, I'm commenting on a couple of things anyway. One is about the guzzle analogy that was missed by a lot of Hispanics. The other is the generic question of changing questions and tests so that particular groups perform better on them. I assume the right answer on the guzzle question is wolf. Which, since 'wolf' used as a verb is an uncommon usage in the dumbed-down vocabulary world, makes it not too surprising that a body of people containing a disproportionate membership of individuals with an English-vocabulary disadvantage, would think, "It can't be wolf, that's an animal." That doesn't answer the question of whether the test should be re-tailored to accommodate such disadvantages, but it does offer an explanation for a non-innate-ability reason for the question flummoxing more Hispanics than others. I wonder how first or second generation Asians or other races or ethnicities with an English vocab disadvantage did on that question. That seems a fair question to me. I must say, though, that it seems unfair to me to eliminate all of the advantage anyone gets from reading a lot, and thus acquiring a larger vocabulary. A very relevant P.S. follows...

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (4526)	1/31/2003 9:27:03 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Here's an historical fact that I suggest be held in consciousness as we (that includes me) wax indignant in such cases. It could be put under a few headings, among them TEOMOP, Oh the Irony, and People Are Funny: In the first several years of the SAT, females achieved higher scores than males on the verbal section. ETS determined that the verbal test needed to be balanced more in favor of males and purposely added questions pertaining to subjects to which males are socialized to pay attention (politics, business, sports). After this change, males have consistently done better than females; yet, no effort has been made to re-balance the questions since then. I don't pretend to have the answer, but I'd be interested to read people's indignant comments about that 1976 change. Damn, I shouldn't be here! But I had read about that historical change instituted to eliminate gender bias against, guess who, males, and figured if I could find it on google it would be relevant to the discussion. How outrageous was that change, everyone? Who votes for going back to questions that produce the same gender-result that the original test questions did? (I'm not voting. It's too complex an issue for me.)