Conditioning and Fairness of Standardized Tests for College Admissions

We advocate that the educational measurement community take a proactive stance to provide tools that improve the fairness of the use of standardized tests in college admissions, above and beyond removing biased items. We believe this can be achieved without resorting to a complete abandonment of comparability. Drawing on the evolution of high-stakes testing in ancient China, we examine recurring tensions between standardization and equity that resonate with contemporary U.S. admissions debates. We then describe elements thought to influence fairness in admissions. We argue that an alternative statistical formalism can clearly state what additional information would be necessary to reduce or perhaps eliminate the distributional differences in test scores across subgroups that lie at the core of the claim that standardized testing itself is unfair. We believe that more data, rather than less, when rigorously measured and contextualized, can do more to promote equitable access to higher education.