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23. Test Biases.




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This article is from the Feminism References FAQ, by Cindy Tittle Moore tittle@netcom.com with numerous contributions by others.

23. Test Biases.

Brush, Stephen. _ibid_.
When the SAT is used by college admissions to predict academic
performance, it underpredicts the grades of women compared with
those on men. If a man and a woman have the same SAT scores, the
woman will tend to get higher grades in college. Thus an
admissions process that gives the SAT significant weight will
reject some women who would have done better than men who were
accepted.

In a reply to letters to the editor in the Jan-Feb 1992
_American Scientist_, Brush wrote:

[A]ccording to Phyllis Rosser's study, "The SAT Gender Gap," the
following question was answered correctly by males 27 percent more
often than by females (a difference of 6 percent is significant to
the 0.05 level of confidence).

A high school basketball team has won 40 percent of its first
15 games. Beginning with the 16th game, how many games in a
row does the team now have to win in order to have a 55
percent winning record?

A) 3 B) 5 C) 6 D) 11 E) 15

With a strict time limit, the advantage goes to students who can
quickly guess and verify the right answer without having to set up
the equation first.

Rosser, Phillis. "The SAT Gender Gap. Identifying the Causes,"
(Washington, D.C.: Center for Women Policy Studies, 1989).
According to Phyllis Rosser, much of the SAT gender gap is an
artifact of sex-biased test questions. Rosser points out that men
have always received higher scores, on average, but their
advantage in the mathematics part of the test was once offset by
women's higher scores on the verbal part. Women lost this
compensating factor in the early 1970s because of the gradual
introduction of test questions about science, business and
"practical affairs," and the elimination of some questions about
human relations, the arts, and the humanities. There was no
compensating change in the mathematics section.

Block, Ned, ed. _The IQ Controversy_.
Information on biases of all sorts found in IQ tests.


 

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