I often see the SATs mentioned by US posters.
I wonder a little about these SAT scores if they compare in any way with the UK’s Eleven + exams.
At what age do you take them ?
What does it enable you to do, or not do?
Are they as class(socio-economic) biased as ours used to be ?
Our 11+ exams used to be taken at age 11 or there was another version at 14.
The object was to pass and so be assigned a better school.
These schools were for the most part better funded, had better facilities, staff, you name it.
This meant at an early age children were put into lifelong role boxes from which it was very difficult to escape, pass the 11+ and it got you to grammar school and a very good chance at university, fail and you went to secondary modern - a sure route to relatively lowbrow employment.
There were exceptions of course to this pigeonholing of children, but it would take extra tuition, and very pushy parents for the most part to trade up.
The main problem was the bias element of the questions which was blatently unfair.
There would be questions like “What is a decanter for?” which, when you think about it, does not give much hope for 11 year olds from blue collar backgrounds.
I imagine (possibly wrongly) that SATs work in a similar manner, not intentionally by race but do, in effect, operate that way.
ie, If the questions are geared to children from backgrounds
slightly higher up the socio-economic scale, then this would discriminate against any racial groups who have a tendency to belong to lower socio-economic groups.
This would then make it difficult for those groups to climb up the social ladder, thus reinforcing their negative position.
Our system effectively meant that those on the lower levels of society had to begin work earlier, paying taxes sooner, to support the education of the better off, who then went on to better paid employment because of their education.
It was , in effect, a method of ensuring the poor subsidised the education of the better off.
I should point out in our education system, at the time of 11+ that it was all free right up to and through BSc level, or rather, it was paid by the state.