Yikes! (SAT scores)

[Yoda]

I think the scores have been inflated since I took it in 95 or 96. Mine was in the 1200's and that was considered pretty good at the time and it was good enough to get into most schools that were not Ivy or top tier.

[urbanbreez]

So knowing about boats is considered "cultural bias"? Pretty sure they still teach about boats in school, like the Mayflower for one big example (EDIT: Actually, I can think of a ton of examples of boats and oarsman we were exposed to in school)? How sad. You'd think having a wide array of knowledge is important, and something colleges and businesses would want their students/employees to have. And the only way to know what those students/employees know is to test them. No win for anyone if questions like that are removed.

Seems a lot like racism. Dang near anything can be tossed in there on a whim.

That's exactly what I thought after reading that. Seems like a bunch of BS.

I had no Idea what the 2nd word meant but I was able to infer that it was a type of boat or boat like thing because of the word "oar" in oarsman. I don't think I've ever heard the word "oarsman" used in a conversation... maybe during the Olympics but it's certainly not a word that's used very often, even in my white little world. It's reasonable to assume that most students should be able to recognize the words "oar" and "man" to figure this out and it really dooesn't have anything to do with whether or not you have a Yacht Club at your HS. Well that's probably a bad example because yachts don't typically use oars but, yeah, you get the idea.

[urbanbreez]

3) The test is heavily weighted towards native english speakers. Two-thirds of the reading portion was vocab with only one-third being reading comprehension. Many of the math questions were word problems written in english and could easily be problematic for non-english speakers.

Problematic might be an understatement in that case.

[Neato Torpedo]

What if the SAT had a section where the students are tested on street gang facts? People from low-income city families would do extremely well on that (a demographic in which blacks and Latinos are massively overrepresented) and people from the predominantly white upper-class suburbs who don't know a Latin King from a Gangster Disciple would bitch endlessly.

Extreme example, yes, but maybe