The Atlantic | November 2003 | The Bias Question | Mathews:
"Just a few days before, a long article by Freedle had appeared in the Harvard Educational Review arguing that the most important test in America, the SAT, was racially biased. Previous work on bias in the SAT, he wrote, had failed to point out that African-Americans were doing better on harder questions of the test than non-Hispanic whites with the same SAT scores. Minority students, along with culturally deprived whites with similarly hidden abilities, he argued, should have an assessment of their previously undiscovered talents shown to colleges so that they could get fairer decisions from admissions committees.…"

The SAT I, called the Reasoning Test by the College Board, is a three-hour, mostly multiple-choice test of verbal and mathematical knowledge and skills. In its three quarters of a century as a college-entrance examination it has become a giant; more than 2.2 million students took the test in the 2001-2002 school year, some more than once. Nearly as many people last year took the ACT, the SAT's Iowa-based rival, but the SAT gets more attention because it is the prevalent college-admissions test in the major government, financial, and media centers of the East and West Coasts. A revised version of the SAT, to be introduced in March of 2005, will add grammar questions and a written essay, replace quantitative comparisons with second-year algebra questions, and replace analogies with more reading questions.

Plenty of Americans, particularly those familiar with the subtlest forms of ethnic prejudice, think there is something wrong with the SAT, and with other standardized tests. For the high school class of 2002 the average score for a non-Hispanic white student on the 1600-point test was 1060. The average score for a black student was 857, or 203 points lower. (For Asians the average was 1070, and for Hispanics it was slightly over 900.) The gap between blacks and whites on the test is sixteen points greater today than it was in 1992.

If minority students are at a disadvantage in taking the SAT, their choice of colleges will be significantly limited, with important implications for their financial, professional, and social futures. In other words, the SAT is interfering with the pursuit of happiness—a problem that has long absorbed the efforts of education researchers and civil-rights lawyers, with not nearly as much progress as anyone would like.

Freedle's accusation of racial bias in the SAT is striking because it is one of the few ever to come from an experienced ETS professional. Perhaps more important, it has caught the attention of the University of California (a powerful malcontent in the College Board family), which has ordered its own detailed analysis of the issue, due to be completed in 2004. Even if Freedle is ultimately proved wrong, his success at raising doubts about the SAT shows how loose a grip the test has on the political and scientific handholds that keep it upright.…

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/11/mathews.htm