Beyond the issue of affirming whiteness as a marker of neutrality - as questions are deemed to be good when white students do well on them - the SAT is mired in a long history of racism, classism, and nativism. Test-makers might argue that race was not explicitly used to determine which questions would be included, but the method used was inherently racist and biased toward knowledge held by white students. In essence, questions for future tests were deemed “good questions” if they replicated the outcomes of previous exams specifically, tests where black and Latinx students scored lower than their white peers. On one of the items, which was of medium difficulty, 62% of whites and 38% of African-Americans answered correctly, resulting in a large impact of 24%.On this second item, 8% more African-Americans than whites answered correctly.” “Compare two 1998 SAT verbal sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT. But studies have proven, time and again, that standardized tests are much better at revealing things like household income, race, and level of parental education than they are at predicting the success of students in college classrooms. This particular narrative neatly aligns with the illusion of America’s meritocratic tradition: Those who work the hardest will reap the greatest benefits, never mind structural inequality. Ostensibly, the students who work hardest will earn higher scores, and those scores will give them an upper hand in the college admissions process. The Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) is one such test. In high-stakes settings, standardized tests are used as primary determinants of student access to, or else denial of, resources, opportunities, and spaces. The more students study, the more seriously they take their education, the better they will perform on these tests. Standardized tests are supposed to be neutral, value-free assessments of how hard students work. “The SAT still promises something it can’t deliver: a way to measure merit.” - Lani Guinier
In this op-ed, Mariana Viera explores the history of the SAT and its ties to racism, classism, and nativism.
#Sat question series
The Perfect Score is a Teen Vogue series on standardized testing in the United States.
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