Forum focuses on bias in standardized tests

By Jen Fish

Daily Staff Reporter

Bias in standardized testing, a key component in the affirmative action debate, was a focus of the Summit of the New Civil Rights Movement on Sunday at the Michigan League.

The summit, sponsored by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary, was host to a panel of speakers who addressed alleged test biases in the Scholastic Aptitude Test, Law School Aptitude Test, Michigan Educational Assessment Program and other academic aptitude tests.

Advocates of affirmative action contend standardized tests favor non-minority students. They argue that because these tests are a large factor in admissions, race must be taken into account to offset the advantages non-minority applicants have in this criterion.

This point is expected to be argued extensively by the intervening defendants in the trial for the lawsuit challenging the University Law School's admission policies, which take LSAT scores into account.

"The mythology of the test is it's just like grades, and it's not," said David White, director of Testing for the Public, a group which helps prepare minority students for the LSAT, GRE and GMAT.

White also presented research showing that students of different ethnicities with similar grade point averages still had a large gap between test scores. Specifically, he found black students score about nine points lower than the white students when they both have the same grade point averages.

Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review, said it is important to realize the bias in standardized testing is not intentional and to label the tests as biased can be a self-defeating argument.

"If you can show people how bias works, than the label of bias doesn't put them off," he said.

By analyzing how many white students answered a question correctly compared to the number of black students, Rosner says he found that in the 1988-89 SAT tests, 575 questions out 580 were "white-preference" questions.

School of Education Prof. Donald Heller discussed testing bias in the MEAP, which is administered to Michigan high school students. Students who pass all four sections are awarded a $2,500 scholarship.

These tests, too, Heller said, favor white students over blacks. And while students may also receive the scholarship by passing two MEAP tests and then scoring in the top quartile on the SAT or the ACT, fewer than 6 percent of all applicants qualify this way.

"The best way to get a scholarship in this state is to be a white student in a wealthy school," he said.