A diverse society deserves a more diverse assessment system. A fresh, four-year study by the Educational Testing Service of the gender gap on standardized tests concludes that differences in performance between boys and girls are real, but not large, and cut both ways. Volumes are printed each year to add to the mountain of data attempting to address the question of test bias.
Whole careers are devoted to it.
My point is not to belittle these studies, because it is important to hold test publishers' collective feet to the fire. But in an important way, such analyses miss the larger point about bias in today's assessments. Any single testing method has its own particular set of blinders. Since the bias in testing is intrinsic in the form of assessment used, we cannot eliminate this problem simply by changing the questions asked. Rather, we must ask the questions in many different ways.