Tutors See Stereotypes and Gender Bias in SAT. Testers See None of the Above.

The New York Times:

In an annual ritual, hundreds of thousands of students took the SAT this spring as they made their first steps toward applying to college. But they were not the only ones being tested.

Sprinkled among them in May, when the SAT was given for the second time since a much-ballyhooed revamping, were a number of people long past college — members of the test-prep industry who took the exam to see how those changes played out in practice so that they could improve their tutoring services. Armed with perhaps sharper pencils and a more jaundiced eye than the typical 17-year-old, they noticed two questions that some thought could throw off the performance of girls.

…

The two SAT items appeared to be classic examples of situations that might trigger stereotype-driven test anxiety, said Joshua Aronson, an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University who, with Claude Steele, pioneered the research on the subject in the mid-1990s.

Read the whole story: The New York Times