Reply #38: I've seen cultural bias in subject specific standardized tests very recently [View All]

I've seen cultural bias in subject specific standardized tests very recently. Our state administered their high school math proficiency exam last month, and one of the questions began "Venus and Serena Williams were playing doubles tennis..." (moving on to some word problem). I work at a large urban school, largely black and Latino, and after the test the first question I was asked was "Mister, who the fuck are Venus and Serena Williams? And what the fuck is tennis? Has anyone in this room ever even been on a tennis court?"

Now, I'm certain the authors of this test thought that they were consciously trying to be as multicultural as possible by using African-Americans as examples, but were inadvertently just as culturally biased. You may be thinking "big deal, where's the cultural bias," but asking kids in this neighborhood about stuff like that would be similar to me giving you a math problem that began "Krrgyz and Oolo were fermenting yak's milk..."

As far as the firemen's test is concerned, it's kind of hard to imagine it being culturally biased (you either know how to put out a fire or you don't), but as far as standardized, subject-specific tests are concerned, it's very easy to accidentally bias them away from a particular group.

And just as a general note, since I have to go to work now, I'd like to add that most bias, testing or otherwise, skews more towards SES than race. While racial justice is still important, it's not nearly as big a problem as economic justice.