User:Emgoethel/sandbox

RACE
It has been proven that African American students and other minorities, perform lower on the SAT when compared to white students. This issue is anything but new in the scores. “The average score on the reading part of the SAT was 429 for black students last year -- 99 points behind the average for white students.” This data provides evidence of the discrepancy in the scores between whites and minority students and highlights how minority students have the disadvantage. On the SAT each question is graded on a scale of difficulty. They are labeled with easy, medium, or hard difficulty. The questions that are labeled as difficult on the SAT tend to be more correctly answered by black students where as white students tend to answer them incorrectly. On the other hand, as for the questions that are labeled as easy, blacks and minorities tend to answer these incorrectly while white students answer them correctly. This issue is thought to be a result of the test makers themselves. Most of the people who make the test are well off and white, therefore when creating the easy level questions they choose vocabulary that is prevalent in their society. The difficult vocabulary questions are often easier for black students to answer than the easy level questions because these questions involve vocabulary that is found in textbooks that can be studied rather than societal vocab, which cannot. This issue is worsened by the way the test makers determine which questions to remove from test, because they are too difficult. They often choose the ones that the black students answer correctly because those who receive higher test scores (white students) answer these questions incorrectly. In doing this, the test makers are creating an even bigger issue because they are taking away the questions that are equal across the board instead of removing the ones that benefit the white race. Some believe that the difference in scores is because of the overall gap in American society between blacks and whites students in education. This gap is caused from the nature of the nation; black students tend to go to schools that are less financially well off. This leads to schools that have fewer resources, supplies, and teachers who aren’t good at their job. This issue is an obvious factor when it comes to the difference in the scores yet the content of the test does nothing to combat this gap in the nation.

GENDER
The discrepancy of the scores in the SAT test between genders comes from the differences in the male and female brain and the way the two learn. Male brains typically have a larger inferior-parietal lobe, which controls the numerical functions in the brain, therefore making males perform better in math. And female brains are larger in areas of the brain that deal with language, which is why females score higher on the English section of the exam. The largest differences in the scores in the SAT are found in the math section where male students consistently score higher than females. These disparities are thought to be because females often answer the math questions how they are taught in class, doing each individual step in an orderly way just as the teacher has instructed them to, whereas, boys tend to find the easier and faster method to answering the question, skipping over the tedious steps. This allows them to view more of the questions, therefore answering more questions with less of a fear of getting one wrong. The problem with this particular disagreement in scores though, is that the scores do not correlate with the actual results in college. As stated before, the SAT is used to predict success in college. Although the scores show that males will perform better than females, females have overall been more successful than males in college. This is found to be true in both elite and community colleges.

INCOME
The third and final major discrepancy is family income. This directly correlates with the success in the SAT test. The more income a family has, the better the child will do on the SAT, as proven through research. These skewed results are thought to be because of the money spent on educational purposes. Parents with a higher income can afford to spend money on their child’s education if they are not satisfied with it, while families with a lower income, unfortunately, cannot afford such a luxury. The biggest issue with family income comes from the preparation or lack of preparation of the test not necessarily the content of the test itself. Families that have a higher family income can purchase multiple prep books, more specifically the College Board one; who come out with a new prep book every year. They can also pay for tutors, prep classes, and other resources such as The Princeton Review and Kaplan. These resources not only prepare the students for the knowledge required in the test, but also provide practice tests and sample problems that can be studied and possibly be seen on the real exam. Another source of this difference comes from the quality of schooling as family income increases. Those with higher income families, “tend to have better teachers, more resource-rich educational environments, more educated parents who can help them with school and, sometimes, expensive SAT tutoring.” The quality of education the student receives greatly affect the success during the test because the school not only relates to the student’s knowledge but also many times correlates with the students study habits and motivation to succeed. Similarly to racial biases, this correlation with income could also be due to the social class of the makers of the test. The people who make the test are often “privileged individuals,” they create questions that sometimes reference class based knowledge without realizing it. For example, they could create a question that requires needing to know information about golf rather than a sport that is popular across the board such as basketball. This unconscious decision leads to a disadvantage of the lower class because they may only know what is prevalent in their lifestyle and therefore not know anything about the basics of golf.

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