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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a theory about the AA SAT scores. I’m a black female who went into a test heavy field (medicine) later in life, my family was pretty well off. The biggest thing I realized is the black community does not value these tests period. For example, we don’t really practice for the sat in my community or see it as something you can practice for. You kind of just take it and move on... we value other things in life. So when I went to take my McAT and was researching it, I can to find out that you can practice for these tests! I know it sounds dumb but literally I just thought it was a measure of intelligence that you couldn’t prep for.. Many of the Asian kids learned to drill for standardized tests at a young age, so of course they knew how to take the tests or tests. Simply put, the black community does not value these tests in the same way. At least in my community, we valued church and community. One should def look into Nigerian test scores as they are black but def value tests more as a community. Anyway, my husband and I will likely be UMC and have UMC kids but again we don’t value drilling SAT tests and such, we haven’t decided yet how we will handle this, as we also don’t see the huge point of drilling for tests at a young age, but I guess that would reproduce the chart above. [/quote]

I was reading through this thread, wondering why no one was addressing cultural differences as a factor.  This seems to me to be the most obvious answer.  It is something that can be changed, but it does seem to be rather intractable.  As a white person with Asian friends, I'm in a similar position -- I see what they're doing sending their kids to Kumon several times a week, etc., but I really would rather my dc be doing other things with their time.  If you think of what the colleges are doing as adjusting for cultural differences between groups, the admissions standards become much more reasonable/rational.  To me, the problem is not just that they are looking holistically at applicants and adjusting for background/cultural differences, but rather trying to socially engineer admissions with a preset view of what a "fair" admissions profile looks like. [/quote]

The only problem with this is that research shows that blacks actually use test prep more than whites and Hispanics, both of which are groups which outscore them, whites significantly so.  The only group which uses test prep more than blacks in the US are Asians.[/quote]

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