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Research psychologist Roy Freedle has been working for 23 years to prove that the SAT puts black students at a disadvantage — and his ideas are just now gaining traction.

Freedle’s long-term project was widely greeted with dismissals and criticism from those in academia. But a  in the Harvard Educational Review corroborates Freedle’s original thesis and calls for the testing industry to look further into the claim.

The Washington Post has more on Freedle’s initial findings, which identified a difference between “hard” and “easy” questions on the SAT:

Hard [SAT] questions, those that produced more wrong answers, tended to have longer, less common words. Easy questions tended to have shorter, more common words. Freedle thought this was key to the relative success African American students had with the harder ones. Simpler words tended to have more meanings, and in some cases different meanings in white middle class neighborhoods than they had in underprivileged minority neighborhoods, he concluded. This, he said, could help explain why African American students did worse on questions with common words than on questions that depended on harder, but less ambiguous words they studied at school.

Freedle suggested that there be a supplement to the SAT, the score of which was based on answers to the harder questions.

According to the Post, College Board President for the SAT Laurence Bunin said latter study based on Freedle’s work is “fundamentally flawed” and based on “a very small, limited and unrepresentative sample.”

But others are saying that the College Board should at least look into the issue, whether to disprove or prove Freedle.

The Huffington Post 06-18-10