Institutional Racism and the SAT

Drawing heavily on Claude Steele's research on "Stereotype Threat," Tim Wise critiques the recently announced effort to revamp the SAT, "ostensibly to make it more fair and relevant for a 21st century educational system." His conclusion:

Instead of trying to pretty up this pig, persons concerned about educational equity, true opportunity and fairness should be calling for colleges and universities to either eliminate the use of the SAT in admissions decisions, or at least to massively downplay its importance, given its irrelevance in predicting actual academic ability.

...That SAT scores have little to do with one’s ability is borne out by a number of studies and even data provided by the test-makers themselves, which indicate that only ten percent (at most) of the difference between students in terms of freshman grades can be explained by results on the SAT. Further, the correlation between SAT scores and overall four-year college grades or graduation rates, has been so low as to be essentially nonexistent, explaining no more than 3 percent of the difference between any two students.

If ETS wants to promote fairness -- and indeed they insist that they are committed to changing the unequal educational system that helps produce scoring gaps -- they must first stop promoting a test battery that replicates and reinforces that inequity. If they wish to provide tests purely for the purpose of gauging how much is being taught and learned in K-12 schools, so be it.

But so long as they release test scores prior to college admission, knowing that such scores will be used to dole out opportunities that themselves result in still more opportunities upon graduation, ETS can only be seen as complicit in the maintenance of racial and economic stratification. They are not reformers, but merely gatekeepers for the status quo...