Yale and Complicit Bias in the SAT

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

There is strong evidence that the verbal section of the SAT, which Yale has valued above the math section and subject tests, was the most biased part of the SAT. Family background, race, and gender do translate into vocabulary differences. Skewed question selection certainly contributes to the test score disparities between black and whites. [Jay Rosner, “On White Preferences,” Nation, 14 Apr 2003]

Sometimes those biases were there by intentional design, as in the 1930s; other times those biases were there because of unexamined assumptions about vocabulary and logic. The elite private sector has been able to benefit from the disguise of social-class selection by the seemingly neutral device of standardization aptitude tests. At best, elite private colleges have been merely complicit in the misrecognition of social class as academic merit. Selective college admissions throughout the twentieth century appear to have been a case of inequality by design.