Emma Goethel Conway, 5 3/10/14 Literature Review Introduction The focus of this literature review is to determine whether the

SAT test is biases or not and whether the test should have as much of an impact as it does today. The SAT was made for the purpose of predicting the success of students in college. After research was done many found that the SAT was biased in many ways. The three main discrepancies are family income, gender and race. These issues lead to an imperfect college acceptance process.

Race It has been proven that African American students and other minorities perform lower on the SAT than white students. In the past year African American students scored on average 99 points behind the average for white students (Jaschik, 2010). Some believe that this is because of the overall gap in American society between blacks and whites in education but others believe it is because of the content of the test. The difficult vocabulary questions are often easier for black students to answer than the easy level questions because these questions are often textbook vocab that can be studied rather than societal vocab.

Gender With the difference in the way males and females learn, there is also a difference in success on the SAT with gender. The largest difference occurs in the math section of the test. These disparities are most likely because girls often answer the math questions how they are taught in class but boys find the easier and faster method to answering the question. These scores

do not correlate with the actual success of males versus females therefore making the SAT less credible.

Income Family income 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 results are thought to be because of the money spent on educational purposes. Wade states They tend to have better teachers, more resource-rich educational environments, more educated parents who can help them with school and, sometimes, expensive SAT tutoring (2012). This correlation could also be due to the makers of the test. The people who make the test are often privileged individuals, they create questions that sometimes reference class based knowledge, such as needing to know information about golf rather than basketball, without realizing it (Wade, 2012).

Conclusion Because of these biases in SAT test many people now believe the test should not be required in order to get accepted to college and instead be an optional test. No test can measure the skills that matter most in life: creativity, perseverance, collaboration, vision, self-discipline and the like, said Bob Schaeffer (Matthews, 2010). It has also been proven that not doing well on the SAT doesnt mean that you will not do well in college or in life. Many successful people have scored poorly on the SAT yet done fine in college and moved on to achieving a successful career path. Because of these new opinions the College Board is applying changes to the test questions. They are making the essay portion optional and including vocab words that are more likely to be used in high school classroom, in hopes to create a less biased test.

References Calamur, K. (2014, March). Optional essay and other changes coming to the SAT. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/03/05/286392637/no-more-essay-and-otherchanges-coming-to-the-sat

CNN. (2011, April 19). CNN: is the SAT biased?. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIYeFNalyJ4&edufilter=Db24N54Eu_vpe4P65Iz5Fa&safe= active

Groves, M. (2001, August 29). SAT's gender gap widening. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/29/news/mn-39684

Jaschik, S. (2010, June 21). New evidence of racial bias on SAT. Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat

Mathews, J. (2010, July 8). Your SAT score has little to do with your life. Retrieved from http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/07/your_sat_score_has_little_to_d.html

Wade, L. (2012, August 29). The correlation between income and SAT scores. Retrieved from http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/29/the-correlation-between-income-and-satscores/