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.

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.

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.

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.