New UC study finds racial inequities in the SAT – again
A new paper co-authored by a University of California Berkeley education professor could add fuel to the long-simmering debate on whether the widely used SAT college admissions exam is unfair to African-American students.
The paper, published in Harvard Education Review and first reported in Jay Mathews' blog at the Washington Post, found that African-American students fared worse on certain questions from the verbal portion of the SAT than white students with equal cognitive ability.
Flickr photo by Dave Scelfo
"These findings are important because they show that the SAT, a high-stakes test with significant consequences for the educational opportunities available to young people in the United States, favors one ethnic group over another," wrote the study's authors, Maria Veronica Santelices of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley.
The College Board has challenged the study, saying the data sample is too small and that