Raising questions about standardized testing

This topic submitted by Erica Bland and Sarah Westheimer (westhesb@muohio.edu) at 1:46 am on 2/28/01. Additions were last made on Sunday, April 8, 2001. Section: Myers.

Erica Bland
Sarah Westheimer
NSII Proposal

Purpose/Problem
We are studying the bias of standardized tests and how they came to be. We will be determining how dependable theses studies are and if they can be included into our research as accurate information.

We plan to look at a series of standardized tests and the methods that are used to score them to determine if they are bias in the grading of the test based on race, class, and gender. We plan to use information from both sides of the debate: that standardized tests are biased and unfair, and that they are a good standard measurement of intellect, skill or reason. We plan to pass out a survey among college students. We will be selecting the students based on their race, class, and gender. This will help us get an accurate account of how different people feel about standardized tests and the effect that standardized tests have on students getting into school. It will then be compared to the information found in reliable sources so that we can check whether standardized tests have a race bias, or whether they are dependable for the task that they were made for.
The message that is being sent by this project is that, we believe that standardized tests are bias and we also feel that this has a detrimental affect on the American people as a whole. We wanted to do this research because we feel this information can be useful to companies and also can be useful to college students that are headed for jobs in todayÕs work force that are subjected towards making these tests a matter of importance. We plan to prove that the only thing that can be proved by a standardized test or any test for that matter is how well a person can take a test or memorize information.
Literature review Ð what have others done?
Our research relates to larger questions like: Why do we have so many families that are dependent on the government? Why are minority rates so low in secondary education? What are some examples of the things that are keeping our business world segregated? Et cetera. With our research we plan to show how standardized tests put a damper on peoples moods and their determination to be better than their previous generations. And when people have no motivation to move on or they have a test that tells them they can only live up to a certain standard they tend to believe it and they end up in low paying, low end jobs. This can be a large source of low self-esteem and therefore low overall performance. Standardized tests are like the end all, be all, of the academic world. It is unfair for them to rate people who could possibly be very good college material and not be able to take tests well.
We will also explain how more universities need to follow MiamiÕs example of the SEP program, which recognizes the potential of a student who may not have had the highest test scores and offers them a college application and a chance at higher qualitative education. Programs like these realize that these tests are bias and are set up as roadblocks to keep certain people out of the corporate world, and away from higher education. I feel that this is a start to doing away with these tests and actually judging students on the things that matter like community service and grade point averages and extra curricular activities.
Materials and Methods
Our experimental design is to do research using the university libraries search engine. We will search the ERIC or Educational Research Information Center for information on bias tests, it has already provided us with quite a bit of useful information and I am sure that it will be of much more help to us in the future. We are also using information from well-established journals and authors of this university as well as others. We will then administer our surveys to one hundred people affiliated with the university that stretch across different ethnic backgrounds, economic standards, and gender. Among these one hundred students we will include twenty African Americans, twenty Europeans, twenty assorted students who would not fall under the previous categories, twenty graduate students, and twenty Professors of different ethnic backgrounds.
After we collect our data we will compare it to the data of other studies to see how accurate the other studies are, as well as how accurate our own project is. We will then compare the thoughts of the assorted one hundred people that we surveyed to see who thinks that the tests are bias and who thinks they are not bias and why. After that we will enter our data into the computer and be finish with our project and its outcomes and hopefully they will match our hypothesis.
Our hypothesis: We think that most standardized tests (particularly the SAT, ACT and LSAT) are bias toward people in the national and world wide population based on their ethnic background, economic status, and gender.
The most important materials that we will need are subjects and texts that prove and disprove our hypothesis. We will included the class in our project by giving our survey to them and we will also give our test to whoever we need to that remains from our list of subjects that has been listed above.
A sample survey:

1.Are you a majority or minority student?
2.Are you male of female?
3.What is the economic status of your parents?
4.Did you take an ACT, SAT, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT or any other type of standardized test for higher education?
5. Did you score high or low on this test?
6. Do you think that this test was bias against you?
7. Do you feel that this test accurately portrayed your ability/skill?
8. Do you feel that your ethnic background played a role in your score?
9.Do you feel that your gender played a role in your score?
10.If these tests are proved to be bias do you think that this is fair?

My survey audience as mentioned before is one hundred people twenty of African American decent, twenty of the European decent, twenty of assorted decent other than the two afore mentioned decent, twenty graduate students, and twenty professors of different decent. I feel that one hundred subjects is accurate enough to get a reasonable account of what students feel for this type of survey which we are conducting.
Our time line for execution of this survey is one week after spring break. Once we have administered all of the surveys we will tally the results with stat-view. And our project will be very near completion at that point and we will just have to incorporate materials from our research to complete a successful project.
Through the survey we will acquire new ideas about the feasibility of standardized tests in rating the abilities of an individual. We hope to raise questions as well as answer them. As well as exploring race as a factor in the success of standardized testing, this survey will raise questions about whether low test scores create feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem in a person. It will also raise questions about the direction in which the United States is headedÉ will standardized tests have a large impact on the composition of the work force? Will reform happen in order to more accurately gauge a personÕs abilities and potential for performance? What is intellect? How can reason be accurately represented through a test that lasts a few hours? Hopefully these questions will be answered in the future, and people will be more proactive in reforming systems that have racial and gender biases.

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