Despite the US Supreme Court recently overturning affirmative action (AA), many scholars believe that AA bans in higher education hurt minorities’ opportunities because affirmative action actually delivered on its promises. Although the findings lack consistency, the impact of AA on the outcomes of under-represented minorities (URM) is generally either ambiguous or slightly negative. The bans exert a less negative effect on more competitive fields such as STEM. The picture is even worse when one considers that AA comes at the cost of lowering the chance of other, more capable minorities, such as Asians, and does not greatly impact the intended targets, i.e., the impoverished families among URMs.
Author: Meng Hu (Page 1 of 3)
This article reports racial gaps in the LSAT scores for Canada (2019-2023). By using the threshold method designed by La Griffe du Lion (2007), the standardized effect sizes are computed from the proportions of members of each groups who attain specific score ranges. Results are compared with U.S. gaps in the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores. Details of the analysis is available here.
In this analysis of the Project Talent data, the g factor model as represented by the Spearman’s Hypothesis (SH) was confirmed for the black-white cognitive difference but not for the sex difference. Results from MGCFA and MCV corroborate each other. MGCFA detected small-modest bias with respect to race but strong bias with respect to sex cognitive difference. Full result is available at OSF.
Chuck recently published the IQ estimates for almost 30 ethnic groups/subgroups in the ABCD of the 10-year old US children. The post was an astounding hit. However, a few commenters complained that the sample sizes of some subgroups were small. I responded that if one could replicate the values and the rank order, one would have more confidence in these estimates. And this is exactly what we did here (full result available).
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Transracial adoption studies, especially ones which examine the performance of adopted blacks, are lacking since the prominent Minnesota Transracial Study of Black adoptees (Weinberg et al., 1992, Table 2). To fill this gap I analyzed the HSLS data, and found that the math abilities of transracial adoptees do not depend on the adoptive parents’ race. Continue reading
When observable measures such as socio-economic and health factors are adjusted, the IQ gap is substantially reduced yet a non-trivial difference remains. And while it is known that environmental factors are influenced by genetic factors and therefore should be not treated as pure environmental effects, an outcome that is typically ignored is that the education-matched blacks fall further behind in the IQ scores when education level increases.
In The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention (2020), Baron-Cohen proposes the Systemizing Mechanism as an explanation for human progress through invention, from the first tools to the digital revolution. Autistic people tend to be hyper-systemizers, due to their repetitive behavior and obsessive interest. With their talent at spotting novel patterns which produce a potentially groundbreaking result, they have potential to be inventors. They are those who can’t help focusing on precision and detail and figure out how a system works, how to improve a system.
How much the 5 personality traits composing the Big Five contribute to social outcomes? Many studies examined the question but only a few also considered IQ. This article will only cover the studies which evaluate the Big Five while controlling for IQ.
A quick summary reads as follows: conscientiousness is associated with better income and health, extraversion inversely predicts delayed rewards, neuroticism negatively predicts health, perhaps none of these traits are related to academic achievement or occupation status and, finally, publication bias is a problem.
As reviewed in my previous article, the majority of studies on measurement bias, either on the item- or subtest-level, reached an agreement about the fairness of IQ test. Unfortunately, even among studies which use acceptable Differential Item Functioning (DIF) methods, the procedure was often sub-optimal. This probably leads to more spurious DIFs being detected.
The advantages (and shortcomings) of each DIF method are presented. The GSS data is used to compare the performance of the two best DIF methods, namely IRT and LCA, at detecting bias in the wordsum vocabulary test between whites and blacks.
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This is a 2-part article. In this first part, the most important studies on internal test bias with respect to racial groups in the item-level, subtest-level and construct-level are reviewed. The proposed causes will be discussed. Generally, the most commonly used IQ tests aren’t biased or only minimally biased as to be of no practical value.
The best methodologies with an application using the Wordsum GSS for the Black-White group will be discussed in the second part of the article : DIF Review and Analysis of Racial Bias in Wordsum Test using IRT and LCA.
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