Word: biased
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However, some of the students most actively engaged in writing clearly perceive the existence of a definite bias against them among both faculty members and students. Sarah C. Binder '77, an Option III major, said last week "the rest of the department looks down on you as though you're not academic enough, and people say that what you write is not really a thesis...
...something that stuck in my mind. When I went to high school, suddenly the separateness was very apparent. There were not too many Italians. You could not get into the clubs or the fraternities. There was an Irish Catholic church, and there was a certain amount of bias there...
Although the Mississippi ruling was not that the tests themselves were inherently prejudiced, the question of racial, sexual and cultural bias in ETS tests has been coming up for years. Brill cites an ETS study that found a direct, consistent correlation between seven categories of family income and SAT scores: students from wealthy families have higher median board scores than middle-income students, who in turn score higher than low income students. Brill goes on to say that "other ETS data, which ETS Executive Vice President Solomon said could not be made public because 'it would be misinterpreted,' show that...
...most common complaint concerns racial bias. Mean SAT scores for blacks, according to an August, 1975 article by Susan Schwartz McDonald in the Philadelphia Inquirer, average about 100 points lower than mean scores for whites. Brill claims that he found a study that showed a gap of 133 points between the median scores of black and white males on Law Boards. Some, including the folks at ETS, argue that the lower mean scores simply reflect inequalities in the educational system--differences in previous training. Executive Vice President Solomon insisted to Brill that the tests "have actually opened doors" to minorities...
...American educational system and the need for a standard measure of comparison necessitate some form of standardized testing (though whether it should be centralized, and so all-pervasive, is another question). But where the tendency to overemphasize and abuse test scores is so strong, the issues of test reliability, bias, validity and misinterpretation are critical. ETS, being accountable only to its board of trustees (who elect their own successors), has rarely been eager to get involved in making sure that the scores from its tests are used properly. Although proposals for curbing, or at least monitoring, the power...