Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [413]
Similar attacks on the use of college qualifying tests were made by some civil rights activists and groups. Ralph Nader, for one, charged in 1980 that the SATs discriminate against minority students, most of whom come from culturally impoverished backgrounds. Complaints and pressure against the SATs continued. Spokespersons for minorities have lately kept up a drumfire of charges against the SAT, claiming among other things that analogies used in the test are culture-bound and unfair to students with nonwhite, non-middle-class backgrounds, as are certain items using special, class-related words like “regatta,” and that the readers who grade a new writing section in the SAT are likely to emphasize stylistically and grammatically Standard English, marking students down whose style employs idioms, phrases, or word patterns more common to communities of color. The College Board vigorously denies all of these charges, asserting that there is no research indicating that analogy questions are culturally biased, that data about the use of “regatta” show that minority students found the question using it no more difficult than did white students, and that the English teachers who read the essays “are trained to ignore errors in grammar, spelling, or punctuation until those errors are so bad as to get in the way of making sense of the student’s argument.”47 The jury is still out.
In the realm of employment testing, activists scored a major success, at least temporarily. The General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), which measures a number of cognitive abilities and some aspects of manual dexterity, was developed in the 1940s by the U.S. Employment Service and was long used by that bureau and many of its state and local offices as the basis of referrals to employers. But the average GATB scores of minority groups were well below those of the majority groups, so if test scores resulted in, say, 20 percent of whites being referred for a particular job, only 3 percent of blacks and 9 percent of Hispanics might be referred for the same job.
The amended Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use the scores in this way, not because the tests failed to measure abilities wanted by employers but because national policy required giving the disadvantaged compensatory advantages.48 Rulings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a number of court decisions led to a solution known as “within-group norming” or “race norming.” Under this policy, test takers were referred for jobs not on the basis of their raw scores but according to where they ranked within their own racial or ethnic group. A black who scored in the eighty-fifth percentile of black test takers would be put on an equal footing with a white who scored in the eighty-fifth percentile of the whites, even though the black’s score was lower than the white’s. A black with the same score as a white would be rated higher than the white.49 In the 1980s the employment services of thirty-eight states used race norming, some more than others. Employers, by and large, went along with the method, mainly because it helped them meet government affirmative action requirements.
Some psychologists attacked race norming as a travesty of testing and a distortion of the test’s measure of job fitness,50 and political conservatives attacked it as an illegal “quota” system, unfair to whites. A 1989 study by a committee of the National Research Council backed race norming but recommended that the Employment Service base job referrals not only on the GATB but on the applicant’s experience, skills, and education. The committee saw the merit of both sides in the dispute:
The question of the fair use of the GATB is not one that can be settled by psychometric considerations alone—but neither can referral policy be decided on the basis of equity