jh
The 2010 SAT college entrance test results are in. Historically, back in the day when I went to MIT, the common wisdom was that Asians scored better in math, but were disadvantaged because of the verbal scores. The men outscored women in math, but women were better in verbals. I’m probably the only guy who noticed that sometime in the 1990s, Asians started outscoring whites when the verbal gap shrank to less than the math advantage, probably because of more American born vs immigrants taking the test. This year, the combined test scores for Asians at 1636 is 56 points ahead of whites, but Mexicans were 211 and blacks were 303 points behind.
In math, there is no surprise in math that Asians overall at 591 beat whites by 55 points, and Asian men scored highest at 605. But I’m still the only guy who has noticed that Asian females at 577 scored higher than white men at 555. Now if colleges like MIT given women admission preferences (their admit rate is about double the rate for men) does it make sense to give Asian women a break if they get higher test scores and apply in higher proportions than white men? And if we break out any over-represented subgroup of women, what about other groups such as Jews or any other religious/ethnic group?
In critical reading, men at 503 now outscore women by 5 points, while Asian men are just about even at 1 point ahead of their women. Asians overall lagged whites in reading, but not by much at just a 9 point gap.
Overall, females did 12 points better than males in writing. However, if writing was introduced to make the test more fair, it has proven if anything to be an advantage for Asians who at 526 were 10 points ahead of whites at 516. It has only made things worse for minorities such as the African Americans, as their 420 was the worst of their 3 SAT scores.
Here are some scores ranked from high to low:
Math Asian male 605 Asian 591 +55 Asian female 577 White male 555 White 536 =0 Male 534 white female 519 Female 500 black male 436 black 428 black female 422
Writing asian female 532 asian 526 + 10 white female 523 asian male 520 white 516 = 0 white male 508 female 498 male 486
Reading white male 530 white 528 white female 526 asian male 520 asian female 519 asian 519
combined asian 1636 +56 (mostly math) white 1580 = 0 mexican 1369 -211, about 4x white-asian gap. black 1277 -303, about 6x the white-asian gap.
The 2010 College Board Reports can be found here:
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2010