> This is ironic because in the U.S. most people believe the S.A.T. is the most biased portion of the college entrance criteria.
I don't see any evidence either that most people believe that or that it's true.
I personally find it more likely that high school grades and extracurriculars are probably the most biased portions (grades because a large portion of them usually depends on assignments with loose grading rubrics, which are empirically linked to greater racial and other bias for otherwise similar responses, and extracurriculars because both access and evaluation of them is impacted by cultural factors of both the student, the evaluators, and other members of society.
Do you have a link to the this study? All I can find is this 2019 quote from the UC commission investigating this that indicates otherwise:
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, along with the UC system’s chief academic officer, Provost Michael Brown, said Friday that research has convinced them that performance on the tests is so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race...
The Chancellor and chief academic officer are politicians not academics. The academics voted to keep the SAT and ACT.
> UC should keep SAT and ACT as admission requirements, faculty report says
> University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement for now, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday
From the article you posted, the faculty senate found that it was fine to keep the SAT and ACT because admissions officers were already correcting for racial and socioeconomic bias, not that bias doesn't exist. It says nothing about a study that finds no racial bias in the test, which is what I'm asking for.
"The new yearlong faculty review found evidence that most UC admissions officers offset much of the bias against disadvantaged students by evaluating standardized test scores in the context of their high schools and neighborhoods."
"Among students with SAT scores of 1000 — the 40th percentile — half of Latinos were admitted compared to less than one-third of whites."
Perhaps the current SAT is, but remember SAT I and the "oarsman–regatta analogy" question? That could explain why some people continue to suspect it's racially biased against non-whites.
To make a target race to score higher, fill the test with things the target race tends to be disproportionally familiar with (owing to culture, relative affluence, etc.) To bump up the average Black score, for instance, fill the test with word problems involving rappers.
1) Is that actually "most" people?
2) Is the belief that it's the "most" biased?
I've heard the claim that the SAT is biased against lower SES for a while now, but more on the left than the right, and I've never heard "most" biased.
We need to intervene much much earlier than college admissions if we want to fix that. But it's a really difficult problem because cultures in low SES areas like where I grew up tend to shame and beat the shit out of smart kids, and one culture's "intervention" is another's "unwelcome interference".
