Post 3 (340): About Standardized Tests Part 2
In my previous post regarding standardized tests, I put forward the idea that Toefl, SAT, and GRE use mechanic question sets and inherently American-prone reading passages against non-American students. As a committeeman of the California system states, these tests are “extremely flawed and very unfair” (Hubler 2020).
Meantime, it was also shocking when I found the initial SAT test was created in the U.S. army to prove racial hierarchy:
Created by eugenicist Carl Brigham, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was one of many tests supposedly designed to measure human intelligence. In reality, it was created by a man who was looking to justify backward tropes about racial hierarchies. Before he created the SAT, Brigham used his initial aptitude exams, administered to army recruits during World War I, to justify views that Northern and Western Europeans were inherently more intelligent than Black people and Southern and Eastern European immigrants (Griffin 2020).
Therefore, how should we understand these tests’ current existence? Do we simply abandon them?
To begin with, let us discuss if universities stop using all of them. If there are no more test scores available to measure students’ academic skills, admission offices will focus more on other comprehensive aspects, such as cumulative GPA, personal essays, extracurricular activities, reference letters, etc. Though GPA represents the students’ long-run persistence and stability of academic performance during high school, other factors such as personal statements and recommendation letters enable the white and wealthy families to utilize more resources such as employing their highly sophisticated social networks to bolster the applications, which will also result in an unfair comparison between poor minority groups and elites. In other words, abandoning the tests, the application process just enables the elite families to take more advantage of their prominent social status. If this is the case, does it mean standardized tests are supposed to remain?
Admittedly, though there are various problems with these tests, Toefl, SAT, and GRE provide all students an equal shot at the test rooms. At least each student can sit in the same room and answer the same questions. As a saying goes in China, “Gao Kao (高考: The National College Entrance Examination) is your last chance to equally compete with the wealthy and the powerful. ” In spite of all kinds of unfairness, the minority students can use their excellent scores to enter the gate of elitism.
However, this does not solve the fundamental problem: elitism. As wealthy families are capable of spending more efforts and money on test preparations and expensive tuitions, it is consequent they obtain higher scores than other test-takers. As Andre Perry, the Senior committeeman at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, says:
Test score differences are a symptom of systemic discrimination… Attempts at addressing the wealth gap, which stems from the history of slavery, segregation, racism and discrimination, should be encouraged and lauded. [P]olicymakers and institutional leaders shouldn’t forget that programs that directly attempt to close the wealth gap will have more bearing on how students score on a standardized test. We should be trying to level the playing field by providing historically disenfranchised people opportunities to build wealth rather than retrofitting test results around inequality.
Perry’s words disclosed the cruel fact that prominent American universities and the U.S. educational system utilize standardized tests to filter and select wealthy and white students as a way to uphold their elitism while considering other students as relatively “secondary”. Therefore, the key issue is not about remaining or abandoning standardized tests since they are all favorable towards white students, but eliminate racial gaps and promote economic equality so as to provide all students with equal access to educational resources and reduce unfairness.
References
Griffin, Endiya. 2020. “We Need to Make the SAT and ACT Optional — For Good.” Teen Vogue. URL: www.teenvogue.com/story/test-optional-movement-sat-act.
Hubler, Shawn. 2020. “University of California Will End Use of SAT and ACT in Admissions.” The New York Times. URL: www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/university-california-sat-act.html?_ga=2.33953633.1978253305.1623331136-779597666.1607424854.
Perry, Andre. 2019. “Students Need More than an SAT Adversity Score, They Need a Boost in Wealth.” Brookings. URL: www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/17/students-need-more-than-an-sat-adversity-score-they-need-a-boost-in-wealth/.
