Yahoo! News - College Board Challenges SAT Data on Web

Yahoo! News - College Board Challenges SAT Data on Web

There's nothing new here that hasn't been said by other people before, especially that of the FairTest group. The SATs discriminate against minorities, yada, yada, yada, we shouldn't have the SAT or any standardized testing for that matter. I don't have a problem with standardized testing except for two things:

1. There is a very high correlation between income and success on the SATs. This is because people in the upper income brackets can afford to take the SAT prep courses, buy the books and basically spend whatever to get high enough grades to cover whatever deficiencies they have to get into the school of their choice. At least, that's my theory.

2. Standardized testing forces teachers to teach to the test, which is not the point. Rather, teachers should teach period and the test should reflect the student's grasp of the material. The other problem is that standardized testing forces teachers to teach students how to take tests, rather than focusing on the materials at hand.

Then there's everyone's dirty little secret, that there are differences between the average white student's SAT score and a black or hispanic student's SAT score. As far as I remember, that was the focus of the book "The Bell Curve" that came out about 10 years ago. Here's a scholarly article about the book, which I haven't read, though I probably should. It's an interesting idea, that there are differences between groups of people. More specifically, there are differences between different racial groups other than just skin color. That's something liberals don't want you to believe.