Cultural bias in tests and discrimination against minority groups

Education - Social Issues

Tests are Culturally Biased

Cultural bias is interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture. Let's see how that applies to bias in testing.

Tae Sung, from Korea, looked at question number one on the test:

Her tooth came out so she put it on top of the refrigerator.

A under the tree.

A under her pillow.

In Korea, a child throws his or her tooth up on the roof so that the next one will grow in straight, but none of the answers said that. Tae Sung knew the first answer meant up so he marked that one. Borden, from the Marshall Islands, also looked a long time at the first question. In his country, you throw your tooth in the ocean for good luck. He raised his hand and said to the teacher, "You have to throw your tooth in the ocean." The teacher put his finger to his lips and said, "I'm sorry. I can't help you. No talking during the test, please." So Borden marked "none of the above. (Laturnau)

This very simple example defines in clear terms one of the issues we are discussing in this essay -- cultural bias in testing. There is no question by most scholars that there is indeed cultural bias that promotes unfair discrimination against minorities. Study after study has proven this to be a fact. And this bias is pervasive in all types of testing, whether it be educational, standardized, assessment, entrance, pre-employment, intelligence, etc. And at every level and age bracket of testing.

Is this discrimination intentional? Many and varied answers exist to that question. But the majority opinion is that the discrimination in most cases, is not intentional.

Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, conducted an SAT bias analysis in 2003. He examined answers from 100,000 test takers along with their race, ethnicity and gender. Rosner's findings, outlined in "On White Preferences," showed that "every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks." Rosner said that whites answered 99% of the questions correctly at a higher rate than did blacks and Latinos. "The test developers at ETS don't intend to produce these results," Rosner said. "They are choosing questions using a methodology that produces very consistent and predictable results." (RamMohan)

Not intentional in most cases, but still pervasive. What's the solution?

Since culture and cultural content are inextricably woven into language, culture-free testing does not exist," say scholars at Brown University. "Even nonverbal tests can have cultural assumptions embedded in them. Rather than trying to make tests culture-free, therefore, the challenge is to make them culturally responsive." (Education Alliance at Brown University)

And Judith Bernhard of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto, Canada concludes:

There is a link between assessment procedures and cultural inequities in the school system. Inequities result because testing procedures are based on a defective concept, that of a culture-free intellectual ability.

Educators need to recognize a diversity of mental abilities and skills, as well as an appreciation of their relationship to cultural context."

The argument has been put forth numerous times that redesign of tests, eliminating certain questions, or broadening the sample, might be a solution to the bias inherent in testing. Others suggest that redesigning evaluation procedures or revised methods of scoring could help. All have been tried, some have helped, and most have failed.

What is soon discovered is that all these solutions applied to a fundamentally and inherently defective test will not bring about a positive result. (Bernhard) the thought that all members of every population will look at the world in the same way is false.

The notion of cultural validity in assessment addresses the fact that society and culture may influence the way in which individuals interpret test items and respond to them. A test cannot be considered as culturally valid if these sociocultural influences are not taken into account throughout the entire process of its development. (Solano-Flores)

We have discovered that most experts agree it is difficult, if not impossible, to compose a test that is free of cultural bias. And one of the primary problems we have not mentioned is that, in attempting to free an examination of its culture bias towards a particular culture, it is often inherent that we would create a bias towards another of the constituent cultures. Particularly in these diverse United States, and with standard achievement tests administered to broad bases of highly diverse cultures, the task becomes almost impossible.