Area : ANEWS
Date : Aug 28 '95, 15:36
From : arthurhu@chinook.halcyon.com, 1:343/70
To   : All
Subj : A Tale of 3 tests

-=> Note:
Copied (from: alt.activism) by Scott Parks using timEd.

From: arthurhu@chinook.halcyon.com (Arthur Hu)
Date: 28 Aug 1995 22:36:09 GMT
Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services


Hu's on First
Aug. 25, 1995

A Tale of Three Tests

The problem of low test scores among minorities has always
been a controversial problem, but three new tests put a new
spin on this phenomenon. California's Department of
Education lost the PC wars, and had to retire its California
Learning Assessment System for elementary and high school
students over conservative objections that students were
being tested on their value systems. But its liberal
advocates completely ignored that for all its reforms, CLAS
made minorities look worse than ever. If people thought
percentile rankings looked bad,  half of minorities fell in
to the flunk out category. While whites, Asians, and the
affluent got the best scores, in 1993, almost nobody, not
even students in the top 1 percent headed to MIT and
Stanford got the top "mastery" score in math problems.

CLAS introduced head-shaped spaces for essays about
incomprehensible passages by authors of gender and color
like Alice Walker. But despite being authored by people who
"looked like" them, such problems proved much more difficult
for unprepared students than simple multiple choice
questions written by white heterosexual staff. Those
concerned about gender bias can be satisfied that girls
completely outclassed the boys in most tests. Thus the test
based on the Objective Based philosophy that "all students
can succeed" turned out to be the test that everybody
failed.

Seattle's police department switched from a written test to
a video test by Seattle-based Ergonomics. However, by
creating a more difficult test which passed only 30 percent
instead of 90 percent of candidates, it greatly magnified
racial differences when the percentage of Blacks passing
fell from 75 to only 9 percent.  Despite charges of
outrageous bias, the actual ratio of passes to failures was
5 times better for Whites than Blacks on either test, and
comparable to other tests at similar pass rates, such as the
pre-college SAT, or CLAS. Therefore, the new test is no more
"biased" than the old test, or other common tests, which
have been shown to be valid in predicting performance.

What is really unusual is that this is the only known test
that fails Asians at a higher rate than other minorities,
when Asians do nearly as well or better than Whites on every
other standardized test. Only on the culturally loaded
National Literacy test do Asians score as poorly as Blacks
with equal education, but Asians are better educated. Unlike
math or language tests with only one correct answer, local
law enforcement agencies had to be consulted on which were
the best answers to hypothetical police situations. In the
absence of formal police training, an individual would have
to rely on his or her value system, and Asians are much more
likely to have been raised under a traditional authoritarian
value system at odds with many liberal Western values.

Going beyond bias, however, Ergonomics may have stumbled on
a genuine career skill deficit that may explain why Asians
have not broken the "glass-ceiling" despite good grades and
test scores. Seattle is unique in having the highest
proportion of Asian police relative to whites of any major
city, and in 1995, Asian applicants were equal to the city
population.  But Seattle's Asians can also brag of being the
only city where Asian rates of gang membership and violent
crime rivals that of African Americans.

While Chicago is arguing about a test that passes more
whites, San Jose, has created the first test in history
since the "street jive" test that passed every black
candidate, but flunked 3 of 4 whites. This shouldn't come as
a surprise from the same city which hired only one white
male out of 22 new firefighters a couple of years ago. The
losers are suing the city, and accusing the chief of leaking
answers. But the city manager, (who just happens to be
African American, as is the newly hired fire chief), is
backed by the mayor in saying that there's nothing skewed
about the results, a 70%  Black and Hispanic judging panel,
or any statistical evidence of bias.  Yet less damning
figures were good enough to justify court-decreed hiring
quotas in Boston and San Francisco when the numbers went the
other way.

Trent Engler, an experienced professional who was passed
over in favor of minorities with zero experience, observed
that previous oral tests asked questions such as "how would
you contribute to diversity".  Why is it necessary to
exclude whites and favor blacks when the only race that is
substantially underrepresented are Asians? How many blacks
does a city that is only four percent Black need when Blacks
are already 7 percent of firefighters , 18 percent of
battalion chiefs, and 100% of the last 2 fire chiefs?

Bill Wong, Henry Der and Chancellor Tien call critics of
preferences "race traitors" . Yet they are the ones who
advance their careers on the backs of the descendants of
Asian laundrymen, sweatshop workers, W.W.II internees and
refugees who must pay for the sins of  their white
oppressors by giving away jobs and admission spots to lesser
qualified Americans on the basis of skin color or surname,
regardless of economic background or test scores. Asian
America, San Jose is the proof that real agenda of
"diversity" has nothing do with fairness but with elites
getting political points at the cost of average whites and
Asians to give as many jobs as possible to persons of one
specific color.

Arthur Hu
12422 107th Pl NE
Kirkland WA 98034
206-442-1608

+- Views do not reflect any other organization or group-----
|Arthur Hu 206-442-1608      Asian Week columnist       |
|arthurhu@halcyon.com "Fairness in Diversity"
|12422 107th Pl NE Kirkland WA 98034 http://www.halcyon.com/arthurhu/|


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