No, the correct answer is “dog”, because that’s the only one that’s a common pet animal, and that lives with people in their house.
(Actually, add me to those who would have answered “chicken”.)
-
Good question. I’ll ask her once she comes out of the coma I beat her into for leaving the kitchen in the first place.
-
E. All of the above.
-
Actually more than just fags like pink but the misconception came about because back in the day when faggot meant a bundle of sticks the most common thing to tie the bundle together was a pink ribbon.
I once took a standardized test that included a question about tennis in the math section. To answer it correctly you would have to know that ‘love’ means ‘zero’.
I felt that it was racially and economically biased.
Two examples I recall offhand from reading about the early (and highly biased) days of intelligence testing. Asking poor children questions about the utensils and proper usage thereof in a formal dinner party, thereby “proving” poor people to be less intelligent. And the other would be testing illiterate or non-English reading people questions in English, and treating their incomprehension as failing the question instead of not reading the language. It was a way of “proving” entire nations and ethnic groups to be composed of morons.
A biased testing situation, if not a biased test: when I assess students’ reading comprehension, I use a packet of passages that they need to read. Some of the packets are pretty neutral, so they are useful for assessments. Others have specialized vocabulary: one is about using a rowboat, one is about a bike (and discusses chrome and suspension and the like), one is about houseplants.
All three of these assessments are, IMO, terrible, if I’m trying to figure out a kid’s basic reading ability. It’s not that they’re anti-white or anti-poor or whatever. It’s that they’ll strongly bias the assessment in favor of the kid who’s familiar with that vocabulary. It makes it hard for me to figure out how to help kids.
I learn which passages are like that, and I avoid using them. But it’s annoying, and I wish the designers of the packet would be a little more careful.
The dog/pet and horse/rider don’t answer the question and your therapists will fail you and lock you in a dingy home for the foreseeable future. Those are things that make one animal unique among the four, but doesn’t address what the other animals have in common.
Not that I wouldn’t be there with you. I guessed ‘lion’ because it’s the only animal that isn’t considered a food animal by some culture. :smack:
…
A biased question doesn’t mean it’s impossible or much harder for someone, just that they’re at a disadvantage as compared to another group of students. Someone can get the regatta question, but first, they have to go through the process of wondering if it’s part of some weird lasagne dish, then they have to get there by process of elimination. The students who know what it is jump over those steps and answer it that much quicker. (This, of course, assumes that these are questions/vocabulary that comes from an outside source, not part of the intended curriculum of the school.)
Consider for a moment a question that was based on some Facebook or Twitter feature. How many Dopers here have barely scratched the surface (myself included, else I’d give a more concrete example) of the sites and would get to the answer some time after the other Dopers who use the sites regularly? I’m not saying that kind of question would be biased in the classroom; just using it as an example I think many here can relate to.
So, just about anything out there in which two or more subcultures do not share may be fodder for a biased question.
The real problem would be if the student doesn’t know what a marathon is.
It isn’t QUITE the same thing, but I was upset when in 2nd grade I was marked wrong on a multiple choice question that went something like this:
#4. Robby was outside walking. It started to rain. He stepped into a puddle! It felt:
a) dry
b) delicious
c) noisy
d) wet
Of course the correct answer was “wet”, and as an adult I understand that this would be the only acceptable answer to a humorless educator. But as a young child just discovering the joys of using language in creative ways, I saw “delicious” and thought that this was a wonderfully playful use of language. Indeed, what could be more delicious than stomping into a puddle, hearing the smack, and seeing the water droplets fly everywhere!
I’m still pissed off, and I’m 53. (Yes, I can hold a grudge. Why do you ask? My grudges feel delicious.)
And so began a lifetime of unmet expectations and unfulfilled dreams…
When my daughter was in the 2nd grade, I had her tested for the gifted program. She fell just below the cut according to the test, and that would have been fine, except I had my doubts about the test. One question she specifically remembered not knowing was “What is a heroic action?” At that point in her life, she’d never heard the word heroic. (Yes, it’s my fault - I’m a terrible mother…) When I associated the word with hero, she knew what the answer should have been. Bu because I didn’t provide her with a full vocabulary at birth, she missed out on the opportunity to be challenged more in school.
Fortunately, she wasn’t scarred for life and went on to graduate high school with honors, get a degree in elementary education, and begin a career of warping 5th graders in science class, so it’s all good. And chances are, she doesn’t even remember that I had her tested. But 20 years later, it still pisses me off!! I should let it go, huh? 
Actually, it’s a direct object. In this case, “out” is an object complement to “Yaz,” but “Yaz” would still be the direct object even if it were in quotes.
You’re point still stands, though. A better argument of bias in that sentence would be if one is told to identify the verb. If one is unfamiliar with the baseball concept of an “out,” one would logically assume that the verb was “called out.”
(And “Yaz” in quotes would be the direct object of “called out.”)
I moved from the South - where “y’all” was nearly perfect grammar, to Minnesota in fifth grade. And while I don’t remember specific examples of bias, I remember a lot of “how would I know this” when it came to some questions that relied on cultural context. And, to the previous point that you “should” be able to figure it out due to context - no one else in the room had to stop and parse the sentence - everyone else immediately understood it because they knew who Yaz was. That’s what makes these sorts of things unfair…yes, often you can figure them out…but with limited time to take a test, or test anxiety, small disadvantages can add up.
That sort of cultural context is insidious, because we take it for granted. My former CEO used to talk to us all via satellite feed a few times a year. And for a long time he made heavy use of American football analogies. Until someone pointed out to him that most of his audience - in India, China, Europe - and no idea what a forth down or a Hail Mary pass were.
That doesn’t get at the problem. The child who knows about, say, the vegetables from real life had an advantage over the child who doesn’t.
Fixing the problem would be to eliminate things that aren’t expected to be taught, not expect more things to be taught.
I have no clue who “Yaz” is, and that question didn’t give me even a second of pause. It’s a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence, I read it as a name without even thinking about it.
I didn’t know who Yaz was until I Moved Out to Boston.
Yazz is a who? I thought it was a birth control pill.
But you’re a bit older than she was.
Me, I’ve encountered the word “umpire” before, but my reaction when I see it is “typo for empire. keep on reading oh, no, they’re talking about baseball :smack:” That doesn’t mean my vocabulary is bad, it means I’m from a country where umpires receive the same name as the guys doing that job receive in every other sport and that I don’t care about baseball except to be able to listen politely when people who like it talk about it.
The person from Brazil would have a big advantage in knowing what other country was on the same continent. Should we stop teaching world geography?
Snerk!
This kind of question is like questions on the SAT. One thing about the SAT, and this is in line with the article I cited, is that it relies heavily upon vocabulary. Much more so than the ACT, for example. One way to improve your performance on the SAT is to study vocabulary words - lots of vocabulary words. Those kinds of lists would include “regatta” and also “envoy” and “embassy” and the like.
The point of those questions, as the article mentions, is not to test what you may or may not have learned in school. That question is a reasoning test. It is trying to evaluate the student’s ability to make comparisons and recognize patterns. And it relies on complicated vocabulary because it is pushing the scale. If every question on the test was easy, then everyone would score similarly, and the test would be useless, because everyone would make an A. The purpose of the test is to find the stagger of performance, to separate the high performers from the low performers.
Now it is a separate argument as to whether these kinds of tests are effective or not at determining who will do well in college and who won’t, or how valid the tests are when it comes to real life situations. But within the context of the test, it is trying to ask some questions where some of the students may not know the answer.
This is where some levels of personal experience are going to make some students better off than others, independent of ability. A kid from Argentina who moved to America is going to have an advantage on the question about what countries are in the same continent as Brazil. But that’s not what the complaint is about. Individual experiences differ. Some students read more, and develop larger vocabularies, and are at an advantage because of that.
Where the significant bias comes in is questions that offer advantage to classes of students. A question about officiating about baseball is going to exclude some students who don’t follow sports, but baseball is a generic passtime that is widely accessible to all socioeconomic groups, races, and geographic regions of the US. It might be considered slightly biased against girls, but that is arguable. But contrast that with a question about officiating a Polo match. That does not have anywhere the cultural ubiquity in this country. Many kids aren’t going to know what the stick is called - is it a club or a mallet? That question will favor the class of rich kids over everyone else, because that socioeconomic group is the only one likely to have exposure.
Is it fair that a question on your local 2nd grade test uses local people and places to make the questions more interesting? Perhaps - it doesn’t assess what you were taught in school nor does it assess your ability to make connections, it assesses your knowledge of local events. If the point of the test is to evaluate how well you learned your schoolwork, that kind of bias can affect your performance.
The regatta question is one question out of a slate of questions. That one question may be slightly easier for a socioeconomic group more familiar with rowing as a sport than a socioeconomic group that isn’t. But if you eliminate any question that could have that kind of bias, there are going to be very few questions left that can be asked, because any question that uses unfamiliar vocabulary to evaluate the students exposure and interpretation is going to be unfair.
The key is not that any one question may have a slight bias, but rather to look at the test as a whole to look for patterns of bias. If there’s one question like the regatta one, but later there’s a question trying to get you to determine, say, which is a breed of sheep from a list of names, and another question that relies on knowing ballet terminology, and perhaps another that asks you to plan a bus route for the least time to get from point A to point B, then that kind of test is not really biased as a whole, because any one question’s bias is offset by a different bias in a different question.
But it really boils down to the point of the test. What is the test trying to assess? If the test is meant to assess how well schools are teaching, then it should focus only on questions and content that the school taught or should teach, not outside content, not extra vocabulary, not experience getting from point A to point B in an urban setting, and not local sports celebrities.
The other animals have in common not being a common house pet or not being a beast of burden used for transport. Commonality does not have to be stated in the positive.
I moved out to Boston 15 years ago and I have never heard of the dude.
Sample Boston test question:
Tony goes to the spa and asks for a Hoodsie with jimmies. He runs into Donna and tells her he loves these treats and she says “So don’t I!”. Tony has $2. A Hoodsie with jimmies is 60 cents. If bus fare is 50 cents, will Tony have enough money to take the bus back to School Street 10 blocks away to get back to class on time?
No, there isn’t any school on School Street. Are you REHTARDED?