Today’s guest post on teaching feminism comes from Emily Heroy. You can catch her on the Gender Across Borders Blog, or on twitter.
I took the GRE back in November after two months of studying. It was a gruesome two months of hard work, but it had to be done in order for me to apply for graduate school. I actually didn’t do so bad on the GRE—in fact, I’m going to take the GRE again in a week, for personal and professional reasons. Unfortunately that won’t be the end of standardized testing for me, given that I’ve chosen to get a master of education where testing will be key in order to be certified as a teacher.
Now that I’m in school, I have some more thoughts about the politics behind standardized testing. I first wrote about standardized testing about two months back on my blog here and also posted the same post on Feministing’s Community blog which received a ton of comments. I addressed blatant racism and sexism on the GRE and in test preparation material I used to study with. But I forgot to address something very important.
The last paragraph of my first post stated that “test prep courses cost a ton of money.” I did not delve into the class issue of standardized testing. The title of my first post was “Racism and Sexism in Standardized Testing,” but in reading the comments from the post, I realized that I completely overlooked class as an issue in standardized testing (a faux-pas in Intersectionality 101). One commenter pmsrhino stated that:
…because prep classes (and prep books which are often more expensive than the classes themselves) are so vital to achieving a high score on those tests (as you mentioned yourself, though sometimes it is less learning the material and more learning test taking strategies it still requires being taught to you somehow) it is an EXTREME disadvantage to anyone who is unable to do any preparation. So I think standardized tests are geared much more towards the upper class, with emphasis on opera music and sailing and other such upper class activities and a bigger advantage going to those people who have the resources to put into preparation for those tests. So it’s a nice triple whammy there, sexism, racism, AND classism. Woot.
Therefore, students have a better chance of receiving a higher score on any standardized test if they have the resources to pay for test prep books and take those expensive test prep classes, then someone who cannot afford those valuable resources.
I’m not going to get into whether or not there should be standardized testing, or more specifically, graduate school standardized testing (which was brought up in the comments of the Feministing Community post). However, it’s important to point out that especially young adults, who are preparing to take the SAT and ACT to go to college, are especially disadvantaged in taking these tests. Even more so, those students seeking the first college degree in her/his family must jump over many hurdles to get to the point where they can apply for college. Taking the SAT and/or ACT is another hurdle (which is an application requirement for many colleges) and if their family cannot pay for test prep material and/or a test prep course, their upper class counterpart (who has the same grades and teacher recommendations but a higher SAT/ACT score because they were able to afford test prep material) will have a higher chance of getting into a better college.
Humph, that’s frustrating. Some people want to see the SAT/ACT requirement dropped altogether from college admissions. Not surprisingly, if this requirement was dropped, the number of minority college admits and the number of admits from lower to middle classes would rise (see this interesting article about dropping the SAT).
Unfortunately, I do not think that would happen in the next ten years at least. I suggest that, if the SAT and/or ACT cannot be completely demolished, or revised to best suit all races, classes, and sexes; high schools should not only provide support for students seeking to take these standardized tests for admittance to college, but also provide test preparation material as well as free test prep courses for all students.
Another thing: I wonder about those high school students who have good grades and great teacher recommendations but do poorly on standardized tests—especially those who cannot afford to do better on those tests. In those many cases, I’d hope that their discouragement from the SAT/ACT does not deter them from applying to and attending college. After all, a test is just a test, but a college degree is forever.
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Ashley,
You’re not necessarily wrong, but your arguments are still very weak. In your previous post, in which you accuse the tests of being racist and sexist, your only point to support the claim that they are racist is that the vocabulary emphasizes sailing?? Yes, sailing (IN GENERAL) is something that wealthy Americans do. So it discriminates against those with lower incomes…not those of different races. Yes, because minorities are on average poorer, then it will disproportionately affect them, but that’s not a sound basis for calling something racist. The truth is that standardized tests are not meant to test intelligence, they’re meant to test education. The better somebody is educated, the better they will do on the test. Hence, affirmative action and similar policies that seek to address the education gap in this country.
[Reply]
Comment by The Sconz — January 15, 2010 @ 10:57 am
The Sconz,
Thanks for you comment. I wrote both of these posts, not Ashley. In response to you distinguishing between race and class: yes, they are both different concepts but are intertwined with each other. You cannot talk about race, class, gender, or sexuality alone when addressing how it affects people. Just because someone is from a lower class does not necessarily mean that they are from a racial minority group. But, in most cases in the States, that’s predominately the case. Please refer back to the link for “Intersectionality,” in which Patricia Hill-Collins discusses why race, gender, class, and sexuality are so intertwined. That might answer some of your questions.
Sailing is an upper-class, predominately white activity. That was the racial discrimination I was getting at. Yes, there are cases of wealthy black people who sail. There are also many cases of poor white people who sail. But again, statistics show that it’s a predominately upper-class, white activity.
The point to this follow-up post is to highlight that while I touch upon race and gender, class was largely left out of the discussion in the first post. Hence this second post.
[Reply]
Comment by Emily Heroy — January 15, 2010 @ 11:12 am
Also, another thing: standardized tests are meant to test education, but how can a standardized test test for education when there’s a huge discrepancy between different groups of of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, in terms of how we teach children in the U.S.? That, to me, is not standardized.
[Reply]
Comment by Emily Heroy — January 15, 2010 @ 11:14 am
Calling these tests racist by evoking references to sailing and opera amounts to setting up a straw man. The College Board certainly made mistakes like that in the past, especially when analogies were on the SAT, but as a test prep professional, I haven’t seen a test in 10 years that committed such a bias blunder.
On the other hand, students with access to more resources absolutely do better on these tests. Private tutoring can help a student master physics, baseball, or piano so why wouldn’t we expect tutoring to help students on standardized tests?
Emily, the point you made in the last comment about education not being standardized seems, if I understand it right, really perceptive. No matter what assessment you focus on, students with access to resources are likely to perform better than students without. College admissions tests often illuminate the difficult truth that many students have been pushed through school, often with exemplary GPAs, without ever really being prepared for higher education. I’m uncomfortable defending these tests but they often take the criticism that should be leveled at big-picture education in our society.
[Reply]
Comment by Mike — January 15, 2010 @ 6:20 pm
Mike,
Thanks for your comment. I’d like to address: “No matter what assessment you focus on, students with access to resources are likely to perform better than students without. College admissions tests often illuminate the difficult truth that many students have been pushed through school, often with exemplary GPAs, without ever really being prepared for higher education.”
I think that we are agreeing on the same thing, minus the racism part. However, while I am not a test professional like yourself, but I have worked with many disadvantaged kids and have witnessed that they perform less than average on standardized tests but still have stellar GPA scores. Does that mean that they are prepared for college? Some may be, some may not. But the point of a “standardized” test is not for everyone to get a high score but rather, the purpose of a standardized test is to compare the performance of a broad range of students presented with the same task. How is that “task” supposed to be the same (such as going to the opera or going sailing), when one student has an advantage over the other student because of going to the opera? That doesn’t seem fair.
Call it perceptive. Those are my thoughts and opinions. I have not looked at the ACT/SAT (and took more tests in less than 10 years ago). However, I have seen first-hand ETS commit that bias blunder on the GRE that you have never seen on the ACT/SAT.
[Reply]
Comment by Emily Heroy — January 15, 2010 @ 6:43 pm