Standardized Testing is Racist (Yep, I said it)

People that yell that the racial achievement gap on the SAT hasn’t closed in XX years don’t understand how the SAT (or GMAT or GRE) is made. People that claim Black people are somehow less smart than other people also don’t get it.

The test-makers have data of millions of people on thousands of questions.

I talked to a GMAC test designer years ago who claimed they had enough data that they could make a GMAT where the average score between men and women were 150 points apart…in either direction.

Let that sink in. Test designers know how the test will play out. They know what the average will be. They decide what is “fair” and what the norms are.

Walk with me a bit. If they could make a GMAT where women scored on average 150 points higher than men, then couldn’t they also put together a GMAT where left handed people under 26 scored higher than everyone else? Or they could norm the questions so that whatever the current status quo remains the status quo.

So telling me, Black people have not “caught up” to white people on the SAT will just be met with a…yeah…duh…dummy, from me. That’s kind of the point.

If the SAT put out a test and Black kids scored 150 points higher than White kids on average, there would be riots outside the College Board. They would claim the test wasn’t reliable. There would be claims of deception and fraud, and no one would believe the SAT was worth the paper it was printed on.

Think about. Without the bigotry. Just think about that moment. You know I’m right. There will always be a racial gap on the SAT…because otherwise, the comparison wouldn’t make sense to White folks.That’s the systemic part. It’s a system designed for the forever inferiority of one group racialized as Black. It’s all imaginary BS, but the effects are real.

So that’s that folks, the persistent racial gap in standardized testing is by design.

Always ask yourself, who is the standard in “standardized?