To: Poet who wrote (4529 ) 1/23/2003 6:09:40 PM From: Original Mad Dog Read Replies (2) | Respond to the racial difference is more troublesome though. why there is such a difference. There is absolutely nothing in that question that even hints at cultural bias. It just asks people to answer a basic story problem using basic arithmetic. I showed the question to people in my office today, and several of them said that it should not be on the SAT because it was too easy. None thought it was the least bit biased, because it's not.test shows a disparity. I am troubled that our educational and social/family system produces the disparity. I am troubled that girls drop out of math at higher rates than boys, that minority and less affluent people don't on average embrace education in these topics as a way of bettering their lives. Changing those things might actually produce more individuals from those "groups" (there already are many) who will get that question right in the future. Attacking the disparity by changing the content of the test is absolutely the wrong approach IMO. Why doesn't somebody study people of ecomomic backgrounds with a low success rate on questions like that, compare the people who got the questions right with those that got them wrong, and try to learn some lessons and put them into practice? Maybe because the mindset that the test must be wrong is more comfortable than thinking that the people who missed the question did something wrong.human race (well, except me <g>); the coming generation contains a whole lot of kids that are half this or half that, and their kids will be a quarter this, that or the other thing. A bunch of white students probably missed the question too, and some Asians, and some Native Americans, and some descendants of Portuguese fisherman too. If they did, somebody ought to be equally concerned about that.
