Analysis of the exam for admission to higher education institutions Essay

Analysis of the exam for admission to higher education institutions - Essay Example According to Karen Huffman in her book ‘Psychology in Action’, the scientific standards for a good Psychological Test to measure intelligence are standardization, reliability and validity. Standardization is when norms and uniform procedures must be established for giving and scoring in a particular test. Reliability includes that the test should be such that measures stable and consistent scores when the test is administered the second time and lastly validity is when the results measure what the true purpose of conducting the test was.SAT is standard for everyone and is also reliable at the same time. But when it comes to validity, some people argue that the results of the test do not show the true intelligence of the person. Why is this so? According to K12 Academics, which is an Education Resource Centre, the analogies in the verbal section are ambiguous and there are errors in the scoring of math scores. In 2001 Richard C. Atkinson urged the American Council of Educ ation to drop SAT Reasoning test as a college admission requirement. He recommended making this test optional. Because of this, in 2005, the pattern of the SAT Reasoning test was changed. In 2006, the average national score of the SAT dropped by seven percentage points from 2005. This was the largest drop in 31 years and was reported in the ‘Yale Daily News’ by Josh Duboff. An article published in 2007 by Maya Srikishnan, who is a reporter for ‘The Daily Texan’, reports that this new and improved test also got criticized because of its writing section.... Also this test puts people who do not have English as their first language at a disadvantage as a bigger portion of the test now required the students to know English. This new test was also condemned because of the duration of the test. Students and educationalists argue that the test is too long and this affects the scores of students (Srikishnan, 2007). In short, the new test is argued to be even less valid than the older one. There have also been a lot of errors in the calculation of the final scores. In 2006, it was reported by 'The Daily Gamecock' that all together out of 495,000 tests, 4411 tests had been incorrectly marks. This error in checking makes the test unreliable to some extent. (Pope, 2006) In an article 'Test Bias: The SAT in the College Admissions Process' written by Susan Woollen, she reports that College Board itself emphasizes that SAT should not be used as a main criterion of admission and that it is wrong to determine the grade point average, class rank and ot her qualities in a student by just considering the score of SAT. She also argues that the questions in SAT are also culturally biased towards Blacks and Hispanics. In 2002, the average score of a white American was 527 in verbal and 533 on math section while blacks scored an average of 430 in verbal and 427 in math. This proves that when the scores of different ethnicities were compared, there was a huge difference and according to Susan and her sources, this difference is because of the cultural biased design of SAT. The minorities kept scoring consistently lower than whites. However, this could be because of the quality of education and low housing conditions that are given to the minorities.