The way to do well on the SAT is to come up with creative ways to get answers. If you only answer what you know you will not do as well. So it makes sense that if your education has been such that you are told to remember things, and are not encouraged to go beyond them, you will not do as well even if you are just as smart and know just as much.
Look: Lime is lima in Spanish, and I thought both of them were yellow. Oh, and I’ve seen green lemons, not quite ripe, but ripe enough to use for lemonade and seasoning.
Both of what are yellow? Limes are green; lemons are yellow when they’re ripe. Mira, tengo ganas de llevar esta discusión a la barbacoa. Tengo la impresión que no hablas español pero tienes acceso a un diccionario. <ironía> De vez en cuando, los diccionarios no te explican todo lo que debes saber para hablar otro idioma. </ironía> Si eres hispanohablante, discúlpame. Es la segunda vez que se me ha corregido. Es posible que hablas un dialecto en lo cual se usa la palabra “lima.” En los dialectos que yo conozco, se dice “limón” para esa fruta agria, redonda y verde. Dame una cita que dice que no, o cállate. Sorry for the hijack, but this is the second time that posters have tried to correct me on my explanation of why latino immigrants would think “lemons” are green. Just in case, I would like to amend my earlier statement to read: “In most, if not all, Latin American dialects of Spanish, the word limón is used to refer to both lemons and limes, but limes are much more common than lemons in Latin America. Therefore, a native Spanish speaker who learns that the word for limón in English is lemon is likely to think that lemons are green.”
Just chiming in to back up chula. Try this experiment: Ask for limón in a restaurant in Mexico, and see what color fruit you get.
I accept the possibility that a Hispanic immigrant might be misled by the lemon-limone confusion. However, overall, SAT exams might be biased in favor of Hispanic immigrants, in a sense, because of the large number of cognates.
First of all, the exam is in English, so a student weak in that language will natuarally be at a disadvantage. If a student is proficient in English, his ethnicity doesn’t matter. But, how about recent immigrants, whose English is still weak.
Let’s compare two immigrant students, one Hispanic the other Asian. The Hispanic may be misled by the word lemon. OTOH she will be helped a lot more often, because she will frequently be able to guess the meaning of an unknown English word, based on its Spanish cognate.
The Asian will virtually never be able to benefit from cognates. So, overall the Hispanic background helps more than the Asian background.
Now I don’t suggest that the SAT even this up, by eliminating words with Latin roots. I do suggest that the search for bias can easily give too much focus to relatively minor items.
Ultimately, if the test-taker is weak in a language, he will be at a disadvantage in any test written in that language. C’est la vie.
[hijack]Sigh I did not say they were not green lemons, I said that I’ve seen them and used them, but I’m more accustomed to seeing yellow lemons… And I said I thought limes where yellow too, since that was what I remember seeing in a picture many years ago…but the picture might have been wrong…
[/hijack]
December, you are right, but at the same time English has also false cognates for Spanish speakers, so there may be a situation in which they are trapped into thinking one word means another thing.
No desesperes, chula…soy boricua y hablo español antes que otro idioma
(a) Of course the SAT/GRE are “culturally biased” – they are a product of a culture. The question is whether the bias creates an element of discrimination not related to aptitude or achievement.
(b) BTW, the College Board guys actually administer an manage a battery of Spanish-language College-Admission (to which we still commonly refer to by the Spanglish term “El College Board”) and Graduate-Admission (the PAEG) tests, designed together with UPR and other Puerto Rican colleges for local applicants (here Spanish is the standard language of instruction). When I applied to college back in the late 1970s, I took both “El College Board” (for applying to UPR) and the SAT (for applying to JHU/GT/etc.), and…
© (Hi, Opal)
(d) … my impression is that once you get past any real language barrier (and the cognate-word phenomenon would really apply to just about ANY Western language of the Romance or Germanic families) the real “bias” is not so much towards any ethnicity but towards those kids who had the better schools and the better resources at home. So happens that in the USA this very often means white kids in the 'burbs, vs. minorities in the inner city or anyone in depressed rural areas.
(b) Karl & chula, por lo menos en Morovis en los 60 a las dos cosas se les llamaba “limones” pero a través de los medios de comunicación y la lectura caí en cuenta que a una de ellas en buen castizo se llamaba “limas”. Pero mucha gente continúa confundiéndolos casualmente y llamando “limón” tanto al puntiagudo, amarillo(cuando se madura) y muy agrio, como a la redonda, verde(aunque madure) y menos agria. Aparentemente la confusión se da según el dialecto local en cada país hispanoparlante (y estoy seguro que a suficientes personas confundimos con la “china” vs. la “naranja”).
(Trans: yes, “lemon” may be confusing to some people from Latin America, I experienced this phenomenon too. [sub] [lips continue moving a long time out of synch with brief translated statement] [/sub])
The message to Karl and chula, of course, was supposed to be item “(e)”. We do NOT have a second “b” in our alphabet…
Sure you do. It’s called “v”. 
SAT’s are biased towards certain types of thinking, certain styles of speech, and certain behaviors, which are all stronger in certain cultures than others. This bias is appropriate, and unavoidable, because the tests are intended to predict success within a given culture, the culture of academia. So the bias that black and Latino students, who typically perform below average on the test, encounter, is the gap between their home cultures on the one hand, and the culture of academia on the other.
Asian students, usually coming from a Confucian culture where advancement by exam has been normal for centuries, and where even basic literacy requires diligent study, typically outperform whites. Jewish students, coming from what’s been called a culture of critique, where mastery of sacred texts and spirited inquiry were highly valued, also outperform white gentiles.
A lot of black and Latino students come out of cultures that were semi-feudal and agrarian til recently. The types of speaking and thinking used on SATs and other standardized tests are not particularly valued; in fact, speaking standard grammatical English can get you ridiculded or ostracized. A child who asks why one time too often is likely to have his or her head smacked and told to shut up.
IMHO, this has to do with the neccessity of accomodating oneself to an established social and political order, where members of the subordinate group are not allowed to question or challenge.
What’s the point of questioning authority when absolutely nothing will change? What’s the point of preparing onesefl for intellectual work when nobody of your group has ever been allowed to do that kind of work? Even after the actual barriers have been lifted, the habits of thought and action remain.
In Northern Ireland, Irish Catholic children typically underperform relative to Protestant kids, to the same degree tha black kids underperform relative to whites in the US. The same goes for burakumin children relative to other Japanese in Japan. IMHO, for the same reasons.
So basically … I did well on all those academic tests because I’m white? 
(Does it help if I point out that I got terrible grades and couldn’t afford those stupid study books?)
Same thing with me Dragonblink. High school was a joke. So I never really tried in any of my classes. I was proud of my C+ average…
The point I would get at is, I came from a very very white rural town. Maybe 3000 people total in the summer when the old folks were coming into town to try and get some melanoma. With this small of an area the school didn’t get much money because of the small amount of students (public schools get money based on enrollment, if ya didn’t know). There were no SAT preperation classes, and I personaly didn’t study any amount. Just too damm lazy…
And I actually did well on the SAT. Even better when compared to my 35 other classmates, with only one doing better than me.
So what do I blame this success on? I would have to say a house stocked with books. My mother (low income single parent) had some sort of fetish for buying books on ANY subject at used book stores and then would encourage me to read them. I think this access to large amounts of information put me at a large advantage on the Verbal portion of the test. Most of the other students at my school had a very large dislkike of reading…
Well, this is what I think anyways. Since I’m not paid to think though I wouldn’t put too huge of a stock in it… and I think my grammar is quite off today… Damm you good Irish Whiskey!
-Duncan