SAT Validity for Linguistic Minorities at the University of California, Santa Barbara |
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| Authors: | Rebecca Zwick Lizabeth Schlemer |
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| Institution: | Rebecca Zwick is a Professor at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9490;. Her areas of specialization are applied statistics, psychometrics, and the assessment of test fairness.;Lixabeth Schlemer is a Lecturer in the College of Engineering, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407;. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Education at UCSB. Her dissertation work examines the interaction between time limits (speededness) in testing and cognitive styles |
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| Abstract: | The validity of the SAT as an admissions criterion for Latinos and Asian Americans who are not native English speakers was examined. The analyses, based on 1997 and 1998 UCSB freshmen, focused on the effectiveness of SAT scores and high school grade-point average (HSGPA) in predicting college freshman grade-point average (FGPA). When regression equations were estimated based on all students combined, some systematic prediction errors occurred. For language minorities, using only high school grades as a predictor led to predicted FGPAs that tended to exceed actual FGPAs, particularly for Latinos. Including SAT scores in the equation notably reduced prediction bias. Further analyses showed that, while HSGPA had the highest correlation with FGPA for most groups, SAT verbal score was the strongest predictor of FGPA for language minorities in 1998. An overriding conclusion is that combining data across language groups can obscure important test validity information. |
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| Keywords: | admissions language minorities SAT |
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