Friday, April 28, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
SAT is biased against females, study indicates
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Females are losing scholarships, self-esteem and access to good colleges because of biased test questions that could easily be changed or omitted, a researcher said in a study of the Scholastic Attitude Test released yesterday.
Phyllis Rosser said that she studied the answers turned in by 100,000 students on the November 1987 SAT and that she pinpointed 23 questions of the total 145 in which one sex did at least 10 percent better than the other. Males did better in all but two, she said.
The SAT, which is written by the Educata
tional Testing Service, is taken by 1.5 million students, annually, 52 percent of whom are females. In 1888, average female scores were 13 points lower than male scores on the verbal section of the test and 43 points lower on the math section.
The main purpose of the SAT is to predict first-year college grades. However, Rosser said that studies indicated that females earned higher average grades than males in both high school and first-year college classes.
Rosser said ETS had a bias-screening process but did not make its results available
to researchers or the public. She said her study was the first to identify specific questions that create a gender gap.
For the verbal section, she said an example of a male-biased question would be "Dividends are to stockholders... with the answer, 'as royalties are to question questioning females would be' Love is to retaliate." with the answer, "as attack is to retaliate."
Although the verbal section would be easy to balance, Rosser said, problems in the math questions that produced a substantial scoring discrepancy were not as obvious.
The test is "underpredicting the performance of 780,000 girls every year." she said.
Nancy Burcy, director of the ETS admissions testing program, defended the SAT's accuracy as a predictor and said that slightly lower grade point averages for freshman were used instead of focused grading by math and science professors in courses more likely to be taken by males.
In general, she said, "almost all of these score differences reflect valid academic differences between men and women taking the test."
Burton said, however, that ETS recently
had begun to adjust the SAT.
"We are throwing out questions that show they're unusual difficulty for men or unusually difficult for women. We also do it for ethnic groups," she said.
The first test developed that way was given last March and results are not yet in, she
Rosser said the consequences of the gender gap included loss of scholarships to females — chief among them National Merit Scholarships awarded to students who score highest on the preliminary SAT (PSAT) in their junior year of high school.
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