The problem, however, is that most standardized tests of this type discriminate against non-white, non-male test takers (at least in the United States).
Can anyone explain this? I don't understand the explanation that follows.
The famous example of this is the so-called "Regatta Question" in which an SAT question assumed a knowledge of Crew -- an elite sport that would have been a rather obscure reference for minorities from the inner-city. [1]
Isn't this more an issue of class more than race, doe? Even with the argument that members of a certain race tend to belong to a certain class it doesn't change the fact that its still inherently a class and environment issue.
Like, from your post, I would say that Crew is an obscure reference for anyone living in the inner-city, not just minorities.
In this specific instance, it's really excluding all but the elite. I remember learning what crew was for the first time while visiting colleges, and I grew up in middle-class suburbs.
The idea is that if something negatively affects protected group(s) disproportionately, then it doesn't matter whether the mechanism by which it does so is via class -> strong race/class correlation. It's still discriminatory.
I don't think anything was arguing that they weren't discriminatory, or in the very least I wasn't trying to argue that. The claim was that it was discriminatory towards non-whites. I'm claiming its discriminatory to anyone regardless of race and instead its more dependent on their income level and environment they grow up in.
I'm a white male but I know that personally I had no clue what Crew was during my high school years. Anecdotally, I went to school in an area where the public school population majority was, well, what we consider the minority when discussing race relations.
Also, although racism is quite possible, the lack of social mobility may explain why race and social class are closely related (i.e. if you inherit both race and social position we'd expect a society to look like this)
But even if they cannot be separated (a conversation for another time) these questions are still difficult for anyone living in the inner city, especially those in the lower income class, not just those who are minorities, wouldn't you agree?
Only if you stretch the definition of "white man" to include Asians who actually tend to out-perform whites on standardized tests. But of course it is actually nothing to do with race and everything to do with having parents who value education above all else.
Consider, some groups are more willing to guess when given incomplete information and the SAT promotes guessing. If there was a larger penalty for wrong answers other groups would do better. Another issue is retaking the SAT tends to increase scores as you keep your best individual score.
Individually adding ~30 points might mean little, but when you look at large groups of people such small changes become important.
The penalty is designed so that you will not gain more points than you deserve if you guess and had no idea which answers were wrong.
If there are 5 choices and you randomly guess, you have 4/5 chances to get -1/4 and 1/5 chance to get 1 point. That means if you had no idea which answer is correct, you will net 0 points over the long run, and this will be the same as leaving the question blank. 4/5 * -1/4 + 1/5 = 0.
If you are able to eliminate 1 choice, you will on average get 1/4th more points by picking a random answer among the remaining choices. If you are able to do that, then you deserve the extra points, because it took more knowledge for you to eliminate it.
Anyone that doesn't realize this deserves to have a lower score, and if you can't eliminate answers then you also deserve a lower score. Bringing in racial and gender biases into this is ridiculous.
I just showed you it wasn't an arbitrary choice and that it has a mathematical basis.
Someone who has the ability to eliminate at least 1 choice understands the question better than someone who doesn't know what the question is asking at all, and is appropriately rewarded for it.
If they removed the penalty and automatically guessed for questions left blank that would have the same effect mathematically, but women would score better. (AKA blank questions would be worth (1/number of choices) on average and educated guessing would improve your score on average.)
You want a test to introduce MORE randomness just to please 1 group of people on a test that is supposed to measure your math ability including the ability to understand their simple guessing penalty?
You want everyone to think in the back of their mind that they got screwed by the SAT's random number generator or that some idiots hit the jackpot and get a much higher score than they should have?
It all depends on where your coming from. The SAT test designers might want to promote the idea you should take and pay for the test several times to get lucky. I suspect this might be why they had pro guessing scores in the first place. They could also give you 4 points for the right answer and 3 for a blank question vs 0 points for a wrong answer. Which would penalize people that randomly guessed.
In any case this specific rule happens to benefit white men more than other groups so clearly that's going to bother people. As to the math idea, they score the English section independently so having people do math as part of the English section seems counter intuitive.
PS: I am a white male that happened to crush the SAT, but I also accept the test was biased in my favor.
Again you are completely missing the point. The SAT is not "pro" guessing. It is mathematically neutral.
If you get rid of guessing completely, then there's no way to differentiate between people who have no clue what the question is and people who actually have a clue. Giving 3 points for a blank question rewards people who are clueless and punishes people that aren't.
If you really did crush the SAT I am rather confused how you fail to understand any of this.
PS: this thought just ran past my mind, it seems like you actually think your scoring scheme is actually mathematically fair. Someone that is able to eliminate 1/5 answers will average 1 point per question (4 points / 4 choices) Someone who cannot eliminate any answers gets 3 points per question??? Where is the logic in that?
If you crushed the SAT they must have removed the probability questions these days lol.
"We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men."
The core of it (as I understand it) is that these standardized tests are written by groups of white men. Thus, the "standard" they are working to is, in fact, not all that standard, but is actually a self-replicating formula that makes sure that the next series of people to create the standardized tests are also white men.
Pragmatically, this conclusion comes from looking at how various demographics do on the SAT, versus how they perform in college after being accepted. Once you establish that this is true (since performance in college is the "ground truth"), then you can go back and look at reasons WHY this happens.
Put another way, the discrimination is the fact, demonstrated by a disparity in prediction vs. outcome. The reasons why this happens are hypotheses.
I don't think anyone is going to touch that; I will point out though, one wouldn't expect the SAT to predict college performance because it is used to sort people into less and more competitive schools and within those schools people select their majors (and some majors are more cognitively demanding than others)
Some of it is the guessing that other people mentioned. Some of it is vocabulary. Since there are correlations between race and wealth, certain words (say Commodore) may be more quickly understood by some than others.
Can anyone explain this? I don't understand the explanation that follows.