Sometimes the oddest things manage to get published, even in (some cynics would say especially in) the New York Times. This observation is prompted by a short piece in the New York Times Magazine from several weeks ago that a friend just brought to my attention: Michael Bérubé, “Testing Handicaps,” Sept. 21, 2003, Section 6, page 18. (Fee required).
Bérubé, an English professor at Penn State, is worried not just about the racial gap in SAT scores but about a whole plethora of gaps: income gaps, regional gaps, education of parents gaps, etc. The racial gap, of course, is widely regarded as the most serious of these gaps.
I’ve heard well-meaning people suggest, for example, that the test be “race-normed”: the average “black” score is 857 and the average “white” score is 1,063, so let’s treat the black kid with an 1,100 the way we’d treat the white kid with a 1,300. This is the kind of suggestion that provokes immediate and justified derision from conservatives — often in the form of sports analogies: if we’re going to spot black students 200 points on the SAT, they say, let’s give white wide receivers a 10-yard head start on black safeties and cornerbacks.
It is not at all clear, however, why Bérubé thinks the conservatives are justified in deriding race norming, for he goes on to propose a complex, Rube Goldberg system of norming every which way from Sunday. (He doesn’t say whether he thinks conservatives are also justified in deriding racial preferences in admissions as de facto race norming.)
But there is a way to “norm” the SAT, not only for race but for sex, income, region and level of parental education. (Every one of these variables is critical. Rural students average 998, while suburban students average 1,066. Boys outscore girls by 43 points. Most important, children of parents who have graduate degrees outscore children with parents who didn’t finish high school by a staggering 272 points.) And the best way to do it is by taking a page from a sport whose country-club associations belie its deep structural commitment to redistributionist justice: golf.
Golf is proud, and rightly so, of the fact that its handicap system allows hackers to play alongside champions. And if only the SAT were as well organized and as egalitarian as the U.S.G.A., every high-school student would be assigned a handicap. We already have all the numbers we need; all we need to do is to combine “region” and “parental education” with the race-gender-class triad, and we can issue remarkably precise handicaps — more precise even than golf handicaps, since the SAT’s permit neither mulligans nor “winter rules.”
….
Take a black girl from rural Alabama whose parents make under $10,000 and did not graduate from high school, and put her up against the wealthy white boy from Lake Success whose parents have Ph.D.’s. Before she sets pen to paper, she could be facing an 848-point SAT deficit. If we assign her only 80 percent of the parental-education gap (217.6 points), 60 percent of the income gap (155.4 points), 30 percent of the racial gap (61.8 points), 20 percent of the regional gap (13.6 points) and 10 percent of the gender gap (4.3 points), the 452.7 point handicap will help us gauge her true talents more accurately. Fair enough, no?
Well, no.
Bérubé assumes that the SAT can be fair only if the distribution of scores of members of every known group is identical. As Kimberly Swygert would say (in fact, has said here about a similar argument), Horse Puckey! The SAT is not a test of moral worth. A test is fair if it is accurate, not if its scores are distribued equitably by race, gender, class, region, etc., etc.
The purpose of the SAT is to predict how well students will do in the first year of college. The biggest gap in Bérubé’s article is not race, class, gender, region, parental education. It is the gap that appears where he should be discussing, or at least mentioning, whether the SAT’s results are at least reasonably, usefully accurate. That is, do the gaps that concern Bérubé actually exist? Do students whose parents are wealthy and educated do better in their first year of college than students whose parents are poor and poorly educated? If so, the problem is not the SAT but the reality that it accurately measures, and the only effect of a cute golf-like “handicap” in scoring would be to obscure it.
UPDATE
As expected, Kimberly knocks this one out of the park.
Handicapping golf – and SAT scores
John Rosenberg of Discriminations is aghast at this bizarre short piece published in the New York Times (Michael Berube, “Testing Handicaps,” Sept. 21, 2003, Section 6, page 18, fee subscription required). Apparently, Professor Berube is concerned not …
I think Berube was joking.
Shanghai – If this was indeed satire, it was done so well that it’s just brutal. You can’t tell me that there aren’t really professors out there who would believe that this is a good idea, so he’ll have hoodwinked the left-wing along with the rest of us.
If Berube admits to joking/satire, I’ll write him a letter of congratulations.
Why bother with the handicapping system? I say we just give everyone a score of 1000 regardless of their answers. Now that’s egalitarian.
I have maintained for a long time that with racial preference it is impossible to distinguish satire from reality. Indeed, “You must be kidding!” is probably my most frequent response to defenses of preference. If Berube was kidding here, I suspect that the editors of the NYT didn’t know it.
Doesn’t it remind you a bit of Swift’s modest proposal?
Of course he was joking. That’s one of the drollest jabs at the idiocy of the diversity crowd that I’ve seen in quite a while.
This reminds me of my Logic/Philosophy professor back in college (way back in ’76, I think). Professor Sean Burke was a very learned, intellectual man of Irish descent. Most of my classmates found him dry, pedantic, and humorless. He could rip shreds off your ego in the most polite, well-educated Oxford tones. But my best friend and I used to sit in the back of his Logic class and crack up laughing all the time, and he would just give us both a very slight smile or a wink and proceed on. You see, we were the only ones in the class to catch his very dry, witty, and intellectual brand of humor that called on intensive and critical knowledge of history and classical literature, among other things. His fine sense of the ironic was completely unnoticed by most of the pseudo-flower children of the time.
Besides Logic, he also taught a great class in Metaphysics that included overnighting in a haunted house. That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic, but just shows the intellectual versatility of the man.
He wasn’t joking. Look at his other publications, and you’ll see this is consistent with everything he’s ever written or said.
The issue for SAT scores is simply how well the scores predict college performance. It’s awhile since I’ve read the details, but my best recollection is that SAT scores tend to predict college grades no further than the first year, and there are many other limitations on how well the SAT predicts. In other words, the SAT should not be taken as a measure of the qualifications one HAS ACQUIRED, but how well one is likely to do.
Some years ago, a fascinating survey conducted by one of the major news weeklies yielded up the following results (my observations are based on the survey summary breakdown of answers to questions given to college students by race and gender)
Black female students spent the most time studying, were most likely to attend church or visit grandparents on weekends and holidays, and were most anxious about their futures.
White male students spent the least time studying, were most likely to drink on the weekends and least likely to attend church or visit grandparents, and were most confident about their futures. One would have to research further, but it strikes me that this suggests white male college students (I don’t remember the campuses surveyed, I think they were major eastern universities but whether Ivy League type or Big Ten type or an assortment of different institutional types I really don’t recall) might count white male privilege and access as an asset they can draw upon in lieu of studying, giving them more time to party. Or, maybe they accurately understand that the partying predicts future high status–as opposed to academic high status.
You can do a lot with SAT scores, and statistically the question is *always* how one is defining the “universe of possible outcomes” (a mathematical term), how one is defining one’s population, and what WHAT PREDICTIONS one is making–keeping in mind that the more narrowly you define your prediction the less certainty you have. You can predict with pretty good certainty that the penny will fall either heads or tails, but you cannot predict with an equal amount of certainty which of the two outcomes (not to mention some kind of Maxwell’s Demon outcome one would never think of) will prevail.
The real problem is that few Americans receive the kind of education that prepares them to tackle important questions like racial preferences in college admissions.
Try the following SAT pop quiz:
My father finished 10th grade, my mom had one year of teachers college and taught briefly in a one-room rural school, I started junior hgh when home ec was still required for girls (and shop was prohibited) and graduated a year or two before women received the right to employment in the only high-paid nonprofessional jobs in the mining town where I grew up. I took my SATs with a 102 degree temp and strep throat, after a 60 mile ride in a car with a crappy heater on a Northern Minnesota 40-below (that’s below zero folks, that’s Jack London weather) morning with wet hair after being up until 2 a.m. because of high school band activities. My SATs totalled 1420 (before they renormed the scores, making it easier to score in those ranges). I am white female.
outcome prediction?
I believe that “all” most defenders of the SAT claim for it is that it predicts first year grades, and does so better than grades (the predictive value of which vary greatly among schools) … and far greater than skin color.
Hi, folks. Yes, I was joking, and the editors of the NYT Mag knew it. I await the letter of congratulations. (No, I don’t. Kidding again.) Seriously, golf handicaps as a model of social justice? Funky Ph.D. must not be very funky after all. He must be, I dunno, some kind of humorless clod.
The *real* point of the essay, buried in the joke, is that everyone fixates on the racial disparities on the SAT to the point of obscuring other important demographic data about the tests. Das all. And the real question underlying all this, as one of your posters has noted, is whether SATs predict college success.
Professor Berube’s admission of satire was much more polite on this blog that it was on mine, and I’m glad to see that.
[…] that’s not true. I will belabor them a bit more. Prof. Bérubé made his first appearance here, a post in which I criticized a short piece of his in the New York Times Magazine that advocated […]