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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Again, every time there is a thread like this, certain commenters always indicate that in a "meritocracy," all minorities would be less qualified.  And that's why I can't really hear anything else that is said.  [/quote]

"ACT Scores by Race:

Year              White             Black               Asian
       2009              22.2               16.9                 23.2
       2010              22.3               16.9                 23.4
       2011              22.4               17.0                 23.6
       2012              22.4               17.0                 23.6
       2013              22.2               16.9                 23.5
      
Source: ACT, Inc.

~~~~~

Black-White SAT Score Gap by Year:

Year              White             Black               Gap
       1986              1038               839                 199
       1990              1031               849                 185
       1996              1052               857                 195
       2000              1060               859                 201
       2005              1061               863                 197
       2010              1063               855                 208

Source: U.S. Dept. of Education, Digest of Education Statistics, 2012

Note that there is no closing of the large and persistent so-called "achievement gap".

In 2015 only 16% of Blacks scored 1550 or higher, the threshold the College Board calls the "college and career readiness" level.

~~~~~

Black-White SAT Score Gap by Income:

Year              White              Black               Gap
       -$20k              978                 798                 180
       $40k               995                 836                 159
       $60k               1017               864                 153
       $80k               1032               889                 143
       $100k             1052               908                 144
       $120k             1066               922                 144
       $140k             1073               926                 147
       $160k             1087               942                 145
       $200k             1091               943                 148
       +200k             1130               981                 149

Source: The College Board, 2008

So, Blacks from families earning more than $200k only scored 3 points higher than Whites from families earning less than $20k. This gap is so significant that colleges give a "race bonus" of 230 points to Blacks and penalize Asians by 50 points to try to keep it even. If the races are intellectually equal why do colleges have to give access debits and credits by race?

We will continue with racial preferences in college admissions and job hiring. We will continue to blame black underachievement on racism. We will continue to dumb down education and occupational standards in order to achieve higher proportions of Blacks.

Differences in intelligence between income groups are not larger than intelligence differences between racial groups in the US, nor do differences in income or wealth account for the racial differences. Whites from households in the lowest income bracket have higher IQ scores than blacks from households in the highest income bracket.

Black students coming from families earning over $70,000 USD are doing worse on their SATs on average than white students from families in the lowest income group.

One of the largest modern sociology studies of American students found that ethnicity was the single most important predictor of academic achievement:

“Beyond the Classroom,” by Laurence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown and Sanford M. Dornbusch, concludes “Of all the demographic factors we studied in relation to school performance, ethnicity was the most important. In terms of school achievement, it is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, or to have non-divorced parents, or to have a mother who is able to stay at home full time.”

A number of experiments are able to test all of these environmental theories. Transracial adoption experiments control for all the shared aspects of the environment that differ between whites and blacks (parenting, income, nutrition, neighborhood), while structural equation models test for possible uncommon factors between whites and blacks that could be acting on IQ (which would include things like racism). These experiments do not lend support to any existing or plausible environmental theories for the remaining lower intelligence scores of people of African descent in Western societies. The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study found that, by adulthood, the difference in IQ scores between adopted black and adopted white children raised side by side in the same high income households in mostly homogeneous Northern US upper class neighborhoods was 18 IQ points.

~~~~~~~

Racial Scoring Gap on Standardized Garduate Tests

-- Black Student Score Results on the Medical College Admission Test

In 2005 the mean combined score for Black students who took the Medical College Admission Test was 21.2. (Each of the three sections of the MCAT test is scored on a scale of 1 to 15.) For Whites, the mean score on the combined three portions of the MCAT test was 28.5. Therefore, the white score was about 18 percent higher than the mean score for blacks.

-- The Racial Scoring Gap on the Test for Admission to Business School

The mean Black score on the GMAT was 425. (The test is scored on the familiar 200 to 800 scale used for each section of the SAT test.) For Whites, the mean GMAT score was 532. This is 107 points or 18 percent higher than the mean score for Blacks.

The average GMAT score for admitted students at the nation's leading business schools is over 700. Perhaps only 1 or 2 percent of all Black GMAT test takers score at this level. Therefore, without continuing affirmative action admissions programs at Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and other top MBA programs, the nation's leading business schools will have very few Black students.

The latest JBHE survey shows that Blacks make up about 5 percent of the students at the nation's leading business schools. If affirmative action admissions programs were to be discontinued, Black enrollments at these schools might drop by 75 percent.

-- Very Few Blacks Score at the Highest Levels of the Law School Admission Test

In 1998 the mean score of White students taking the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) was 151.96. (The LSAT is graded on a scoring scale of 120 to 180.) The mean score for Black students taking the test that year was 141.80, about 17 percent lower than the mean score of Whites.

The latest data shows a slight improvement for both Blacks and Whites, but there was no progress in closing the racial scoring gap. In 2004 the mean score for Whites on the LSAT was 152.47. For Blacks, the mean score was 142.43. The 10 point, or 17 percent, scoring gap has remained constant throughout the period with only very minor fluctuations.

Students seeking admission to the nation's highest-ranked law schools such as Yale, Harvard, and Stanford have a mean LSAT score of about 170. Data obtained by JBHE from the Law School Admission Council shows that very few Blacks nationwide score at this level.

In 2004, 10,370 Blacks took the LSAT examination. Only 29 Blacks, or 0.3 percent of all LSAT test takers, scored 170 or above. In contrast, more than 1,900 White test takers scored 170 or above on the LSAT. They made up 3.1 percent of all White test takers. Thus Whites were more than 10 times as likely as Blacks to score 170 or above on the LSAT. There were 66 times as many Whites as Blacks who scored 170 or above on the test.

Even if we drop the scoring level to 165, a level equal to the mean score of students enrolling at law schools ranked in the top 10 nationwide but not at the very top, we still find very few Blacks. There were 108 Blacks scoring 165 or better on the LSAT in 2004. They made up 1 percent of all Black test takers. For Whites, there were 6,689 test takers who scored 165 or above. They made up 10.6 percent of all White students who took the LSAT examination.

The nation's top law schools could fill their classes exclusively with students who scored 165 or above on the LSAT. But if they were to do so, these law schools would have almost no Black students.

-- The Racial Scoring Gap on the Graduate Record Examination

The vast majority of Black graduate students do not attend professional schools of law, business, or medicine. Most Black students are enrolled in graduate programs in other academic disciplines including education, natural sciences, mathematics, foreign languages, the humanities, the arts, history, psychology, and the social sciences. For these students the important test is the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).

This test begins with two analytical writing sections, one where the student is given a choice of topics. The analytical writing section is scored on a scale of 0 to 6. Then there is a 30-minute verbal reasoning test and a 45-minute quantitative section. The test is given on a computer terminal and the test is adaptive, meaning that the test questions are selected based on correct or incorrect responses to previous questions. These two sections are scored on the familiar 200 to 800 scale used for the SAT test.

Each year about 300,000 college students seeking admission to graduate programs in fields such as education, the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences sit for the GRE. In 2003, the latest year for which there is complete data available, 27,267 Blacks took the GRE test. Therefore, Blacks made up 8.8 percent of all students who took the GRE.

In 2003 the mean score for Blacks on the combined verbal and quantitative sections of the GRE was 821. For Whites, the mean combined score was 1062. Thus the mean White score was 241 points, or 20 percent, higher than the mean score for Blacks. This racial scoring gap is even wider than the persistent and growing gap on the SAT test.

In 2003 the mean Black score on the analytical writing section was 3.7 on a scale of 0 to 6. For Whites, the mean score was 4.5, a difference of about 13 percent. There is no way to compare the trend in the gap on this portion of the GRE because the 0 to 6 scale was recently instituted. Previously the analytical section of the test was scored on the 200 to 800 scale.

The GRE scoring gap between Blacks and Whites varies to a large degree depending on the field of proposed study in graduate school. Black students planning to study in the field of engineering scored on average 187 points below whites who plan to pursue a graduate degree in engineering. In the physical sciences, Black students on average scored 247 points below Whites."[/quote]

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