Real life examples of biased test questions?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

Has anyone seen a question that is biased against boys? Perhaps something like this:

Mary wants to add a bordering of lace to her Sunday dress. The hem of her dress is 50 inches. She wants to add 1 inch of lace and will need 0.5 inches of material for joining. To join material, Mary needs 1.5 inches of thread for each 1 inch joined. The lace she would like to use costs 20 cents per square inch and thread costs 1 cent for ten inches. How much money must she spend for materials?

In the end it’s just a simple math problem but how many boys know what it means to add a border to a hem?

82

I agree with the basic idea that commonality can relate to a negative trait (They are common because they all lack… or are all not…), but I understand that the question may be implying a positive commonality. Some negative commonalities make intuitive sense as a commonality, such as “these three counties share a commonality in having no natural lakes”, but other ones could seem more contrived such as “These three Illinois cities have in common the fact that Abraham Lincoln never entered them even though they were there when he was alive.”, and may not be accepted as a realistic answer.

Also, dogs are a beast of burden in some arctic areas (dogsleds anyone?). They aren’t ridden, but they are used to pull vehicles.

83

Actually, yes. There was a test question I encountered recently that talked about how many yards of ribbon (or lace, I forget which) two people needed to make a costume. However, I didn’t consider it biased, because it used pretty straightforward vocabulary, unlike your example (which honestly I can’t make heads or tails of–maybe it’s a better example than the one I read!)

84

Easy, the Chicken.

Why? Well, the lion, dog and houyhnhnm are all potential maneaters.

85

No it’s not. The answer is lion. It is the only meat not regularly eaten in Asia.

86

Well… In Traditional Chinese Medicine, lion parts are used, and the Chinese use the word "吃‘ for both eating food and taking medicine.

87

My daughter ran across a question that wasn’t so much class biased as regionally biased.

After some 4th grade standardized testing her teacher was telling us there was one question that almost everyone in her class got wrong. I can’t remember the exact question, but the gist is it was asking during what season you would go outside to play.

Given that we lived in a region where a typical December day was 72 degrees and sunny and a typical July day was 98 degrees and thunderstorms the kids in her class knew that summer was when you stayed inside in the air conditioning and winter was when you played outside. Not the answer the test was looking for.

88

This, IMNSHO, is the problem. The tests are supposed to judge what has been learned in school. Period. What they learn at home is immaterial. I would have been able to do a batting average question, for example, because I learned about baseball during recess at school, not because my old man sat down with me and explained the difference between a base hit and a walk in figuring averages.

And the simple fact of the matter is that the tests cannot be all things to all people. If they try to be, then they’re going to wind up being a single question: what is your name? And even then, some of the kids are going to get that wrong.

89

Different tests have different purposes. Some tests are trying to judge what students learned in school. Those should have questions based upon school lessons.

Others are trying to assess different traits for different reasons. IQ tests, for instance, are attempting to determine different reasoning abilities and put them in some sort of standardized system. College placement tests are attempting to assess whether students will do well in an academic environment, or if they should pursue some other career future, like tradeschool.

Whether those kinds of tests are valid for their intended function is a separate issue. Their test purpose is different, so having different kinds of questions with outside source material is acceptable.

The makers of the quiz seem to be most concerned about using academic performance tests used to measure students’ needs as a means of measuring the performance of the teachers and the schools. This dual purpose is perhaps at odds, and thus an unfair use of question types.

But if you’re trying to solely measure what a child learned in school, what topics can you use for your math word problems?

“Jimmy has seven apples.” - Oops, apples are from the supermarket. We don’t have apples. Crap, I guess we need to get some apples for kindergarden.

“One train leaves Boston at 7 am. A second train leaves Chicago at 7:30 am.” Oh damn, we’ve just introduced trains and two different cities. Crap.

I think we need a clear definintion of “outside material” before this can in any way be a meaningful criteria.

90

I think you might be being sarcastic, but this is a real issue. I’ve got a kid without a lot of background knowledge in general, and who’s not always a strong reader. There was a multiplication test with a problem that said something like, “A cage can hold five gerbils. If you have 20 gerbils, how many groups of five can you make?” The student read “gerbil” as “group” and found the problem incomprehensible.

So I sat down with him and, wanting to test his math at this point (I had other assessments of his reading), told him that the word was “gerbil,” not “group.” When he looked blankly at me, I asked him if he knew what a gerbil is. He had no idea.

Sure, you could solve that problem with a word you don’t understand: “A cage can hold five fnreps. If you have 20 fnerps, how many groups of five can you make?” But that makes solving the problem that much more difficult, since you can’t really visualize what’s going on. For a child who struggles with abstract reasoning, who thinks very concretely, it makes the problems overwhelmingly difficult.

I’ve spoken with our school’s specialist in struggling learners. She’s suggested that test problems should have two student names that always appear, and that they should always work with the same thing. Jim and Bob will be eating pizza in every fraction problem on every test. Sure, that limits the students’ ability to generalize mathematical concepts, but it prevents students like the one I named from scoring artificially low, based on their lack of familiarity with croissants or with giraffes or with roller coasters or with whatever else he just doesn’t know about.

(Interestingly, today I talked with this student about some junky Iron Man book he’s reading. He was able to discuss it with a lot more coherence and fluency than he’s ever discussed a book before, since he’s watched the cartoon countless times. Background knowledge FTW!)

91

The questions they use as exampels are really really badly chosen. But the basic point that it’s really hard to design a question that’s (mostly) fair in testing what it’s supposed to test, and not accidentally relying on knowing something that some people will know and some people (usually people who differ in culture or socioeconomic class from the question setters) will not.

92

Me and most of the people I grew up with.

See? The bias is so pervasive you don’t even know you have it until it’s pointed out.

93

I didn’t either. However, believe making excuses for different home environments is not the goal. Dumb is just dumb no matter how you got there. I knew stuff about music not because I ever practiced it but because I read about it on my own because I liked reading anything even soup can labels. One of the jobs of standardized tests pick those types of knowledge gaps up. It isn’t a value judgement. It just means the student in question is behind their peers in some significant way and will likely have further problems in education or the workplace because of it.

Well designed standardized tests are never perfect at the individual level but they are great at correlations across groups. You can’t just wave your hands and make knowledge gaps irrelevant out of sympathy. It doesn’t do anyone any favors.

94

And this could be one of the reasons why kids ask how they are going to use math in real life. In real life, when you are looking for a quantitative answer for something (e.g. “How much gas will I need to get to New York?” or “If I continue to save $3000 per year earning 5% on all savings, how many years will it take me to accumulate $50,000?”), you have to figure out what type of math you need and how to set out the problem so that you can do the end arithmetic/algebra/calculus/what have you. People don’t go through normal life oblivious to the world of math around them until “2y + 55 = 4, Find y, show your work” appears in front of their mind. They have to recognize WHEN they need to “find y” to begin with.

95

Dude, I know you’re trying to make a rhetorical point here, but your example is abjectly horrible. It is the pathetic, big-eyed, orphaned kitten of test questions. The vast majority of people – not just boys – have no idea about putting a lace border on the hem of a skirt. Some of these people, all women, have paid me to do such things for them and have not had the vocabulary or knowledge to describe what they wanted done. This question is biased against anyone who does not have sewing knowledge, which is the majority of the population anymore.

Apart from that, the way in which you describe lace being sold bears absolutely no resemblance to how it’s sold in real life, so the people who do know about adding lace borders will be horribly confused by the way the question is set up. Lace isn’t sold by the square inch. It’s sold by fractions of a yard, with cheaper laces sold by the reel, and it comes in different widths. Also, lace is whipped to edges without seam allowances. Mary is a shitty seamstress.

Lastly, the answer to your question is $15.075. Did you want that rounded to the nearest penny?

96

Has anybody discussed this one yet?

97

The questions at the bottom of the article actually made more sense than the lead off questions.

Why did the animals most likely eat the pineapple? A: Of the answers given, the one that makes practical sense (true, not at all in keeping with the spirit of a silly story) (okay, surreal story) is that animals and people most often eat things because they are hungry.

Which animal was the wisest? A: The animal that made the most factual observation, least likely to be biased, was the owl. There is easily some debate as to whether that is wise, because the owl is obviously no fun, and is likely to be the first thrown off the island.

98

Oops. Yeah, I was trying to allude to being ridden. Serves me right.

Wow, that one is a pretty bad question. I mean, as a joke, it’s kinda a shaggy dog story. As an essay to parse meaning from, it’s rather off the wall.

First off, it declares that animals used to be able to talk. Then it brings up a talking pineapple, and “oh yeahs” that fruits could talk, too. Great start, there.

The first question is about the order the events in the story are told. Okay.

The second question asks why the animals ate the pineapple. Students are supposed to deduce it is in retribution for the pineapple challenging the hare and then doing nothing, but deceiving them into rooting for it. Yeah.

Third question, which animal spoke the wisest words? Well, the hare said “You aren’t even an animal, you’re a tropical fruit!” But that’s less wise than the owl saying, “Pineapples don’t have sleeves.” Really?

I mean, “The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve” is not meant to be taken literally, as the moose explains. So the owl’s literal interpretation of a common idiom is somehow supposed to be wise?

4, before the race how did the animals feel about the pineapple? Um, indifferent? Because they didn’t care unti the challenge was made. Oh, “suspicious”.

Question 5, What would have happened if the animals had chosen to cheer for the hare? They’d have eaten the pineapple, because they were hungry, and the pineapple couldn’t run away. What do you mean, that’s not a possible answer?

Question 6, decyphering the idiom that the owl was too dumb to get, and ended up being the moral of the story. :smack:

God, that is a horrid test question. I think I could use test taking skills and parse my way through, but it’s a very lame question.