Balance (1965 - 1990)
Cultural Bias
Some critics charged that the SAT was biased against minorities and the poor. The critics charged that African-Americans scored approximately 100 points lower on the SAT than did their white counterparts. They argued that this proved that the test was culturally biased.
The College Board did not deny that there was a score gap between white and minority test-takers. However, officials of the College Board, including former College Board president George Hanford, insisted that this did not prove the test's bias but only showed that there were unequal educational opportunities for minorities and whites. This, officials argued, showed that there needed to be further efforts at providing equal educational opportunities.
In Life with the SAT (1991), Hanford claims that he convinced the College Board trustees and black and Hispanic community leaders, including the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that publishing test score data would be in the interests of young blacks and Hispanics. Hanford suggested that when people saw the discrepancies in test scores between minority and white students, that there would be a general ground-swell in support of providing equal educational opportunities.
The critics also charged that vocabulary on individual test questions was not culturally sensitive and therefore discriminated against black and Hispanic students.
In response, The College Board and ETS initiated sensitivity reviews of test items as a way to identify and weed out discriminatory test items. The College Board also piloted testing programs designed to eliminate cultural bias, however, College Board officials continued to claim that the test itself was not biased.
Critics also charged that college admissions officers used the SAT as a way to discriminate against blacks in admissions. The College Board recognized that this was a possibility but tried to disassociate the test from "The Uses and Misuses of Tests," as a College Board Review article by Diane Ravitch was entitled.
More generally, the College Board responded to these critics in a number of ways.
The College Board continued to stand by psychometric judgment of standardized testing as highly reliable, valid, and predictable. The College Board insisted that the test, itself, did not discriminate against minorities.
The College Board began to make clearer distinctions between the tests (as objective and unbiased) and the uses or misuses of tests by college admissions officers and educators.
The College Board attempted to address minority issues through a number of initiatives. The College Board began desegregating its test-taking centers in the South in the late 1950s. The College Board had a program that waived the test fees for those unable to pay for the SAT as a way to encourage poor youth to contemplate higher education.
In The 62nd Annual Report of the College Board (1964-1965), College Board officials were optimistic about the possibilities that the SAT and the Board's testing program could weather the criticism tests received. By 1967-1968, the College Board was less optimistic.
