Comments on: Affirmative Action and the SAT http://pennpoliticalreview.org/2010/06/affirmative-action-and-the-sat/ Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:27:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Ett http://pennpoliticalreview.org/2010/06/affirmative-action-and-the-sat/#comment-178 Ett Thu, 24 Jun 2010 02:57:36 +0000 http://pennpoliticalreview.org/2010/06/affirmative-action-and-the-sat/#comment-178 Intuitively, I think we should be looking at what tests *are actually testing*. If a firefighting test is testing actual ability to put out fires properly, then let's accept the results and not worry too much about the distribution of the ethnicities of those that scored well. If there are questions about British history on it, and the 3 Brits in the applicant pool score high on it, then it's a bad test.<br /><br />As far as the SAT, I think the math and reading comp sections are decent reflections of how well people can do math and read. In writing section, I filled the grammar multiple choice by reading the choices and seeing which "sounded right." Since grammar isn't taught too much any more in schools, your only real hope for being able to "hear" the correct sentence is having parents (or somehow peers) that spoke proper English. So to me, the SAT writing section is a test of how well your parents spoke English, which maps pretty well to how educated/wealthy they are. So to me that's bogus, and since socioeconomic status is so tied up with race in the US (and probably most other places), we need to be able to discuss this on factual and moral grounds.<br /><br />As a rebuttal to the argument that everyone had the opportunity to learn the rules of grammar -- let me say that I never learned them, and I suspect that most people that scored well on SAT writing never learned grammar formally, but rather just picked it up from their parents. So to expect people who didn't grow up with perfect English spoken in the house to learn grammar puts them at a real disadvantage. Intuitively, I think we should be looking at what tests *are actually testing*. If a firefighting test is testing actual ability to put out fires properly, then let's accept the results and not worry too much about the distribution of the ethnicities of those that scored well. If there are questions about British history on it, and the 3 Brits in the applicant pool score high on it, then it's a bad test.

As far as the SAT, I think the math and reading comp sections are decent reflections of how well people can do math and read. In writing section, I filled the grammar multiple choice by reading the choices and seeing which "sounded right." Since grammar isn't taught too much any more in schools, your only real hope for being able to "hear" the correct sentence is having parents (or somehow peers) that spoke proper English. So to me, the SAT writing section is a test of how well your parents spoke English, which maps pretty well to how educated/wealthy they are. So to me that's bogus, and since socioeconomic status is so tied up with race in the US (and probably most other places), we need to be able to discuss this on factual and moral grounds.

As a rebuttal to the argument that everyone had the opportunity to learn the rules of grammar — let me say that I never learned them, and I suspect that most people that scored well on SAT writing never learned grammar formally, but rather just picked it up from their parents. So to expect people who didn't grow up with perfect English spoken in the house to learn grammar puts them at a real disadvantage.

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