What Effect Does Socioeconomic Status Have On SAT Scores?

Running head : Socioeconomic Status on SAT Scores

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The SAT score was started way back in the 1800s by Sir Francis Galton who believed that heredity determined intellect of persons . There are some issues which arise from intelligence tests , these are that they identify the intellectual ability of persons , they have tasks which are based on the white people 's experience , the variance experienced in the tests are due to inherent ability characterized by race , environment and individual experience which impact on a persons

performance , they have always been used to include or exclude students from educational programs and they show a disparity between socioeconomic populations

Problems have always existed in standardization of the tests as the average scores were for the whites and not everyone in the society and even as they included other students , they were not reflected on the diversities which were found in the schools . The differences which are found in the scores have up to know persisted on the intelligence tests and other scores regardless of the grades from the lower schools to the graduate levels , the differences have also been found in dominant cultures of students who are from the lower socioeconomic levels in the society (Harmon Deborah , 2004

The language used in the tests is of the dominant culture standard English which many do not use , as a result , a study which was carried out to test the problems students from the culturally diverse students faced from the tests showed that most of them were not sure they would pass because they were not able to understand what was expected of them . Great differences are seen in the culture , language and experiences from the different societies and as the scores use the middle class experiences , it becomes difficult for others to understand them and as a result , many of the publishers have reviewed and eliminated the test items which have cultural and racial bias although the bias still remains and even when students tested have a similar education background , there is still existence of SAT score gaps when it comes to comparison of race and gender

Due to the given history of the SAT scores and the results which have emerged , the students from lower socioeconomic class have a negative attitude towards the test and this impacts on their performance of the tests as it lowers the motivation of taking the tests , create anxiety and therefore lead to poor performance

The attitudes and expectations of teachers greatly affects the performance of students on the performance in the tests , many of the teachers teach on the basis of their perceptions and unconsciously belief that the students from diverse cultures are not as intelligent as the students from the white families and as a result they discriminate on the ability of the students coming from low socioeconomic classes (Finley , 2002

The SAT scores create a very large disparity in the test scores among the majority and the minority students in schools...