But you're actually making an important point. These tests _do_ measure cultural issues. So what? If the issue is to get along in _this_ society -- i.e., go to college, get a job, etc. -- then cultural issues _do_ matter. Rather than trying to eliminate them from the test, let's put them back into the curriculum. Let's take everyone to a baseball game, so that they know what "America's pastime" is all about. This business of trying to protect immigrants from American culture is B.S. I recall several Vietnamese immigrant kids who managed to learn enough English in 2-3 years to _win_ the spelling bee! The best time to learn culture is when you're a kid -- it comes effortlessly.

From what I can tell, these tests are already doing what they are intended to do: determine who can function in our society.

So what if I went to France or Germany and couldn't perform on their math tests. If I were planning to live there, then I would expect to have to learn something about their language & culture. My brother-in-law studied physics in Germany, and they didn't provide any "special education" for him -- he had to learn German, and fast. A doctor friend went to medical school in Switzerland. Ditto. He had to learn French, and quickly. I don't see Saudia Arabia making any special provisions for non-Moslems. We're not doing people any favors through "race-norming" or "culture-norming", because the society at large isn't "race-normed" or "culture-normed". We're just putting off the inevitable day when they discover that they have to learn the same stuff as everyone else. At 02:39 PM 7/3/03 -0400, William Thurston wrote:

The main issue with "common sense" needed for word problems is: common to who? It's quite hard to filter out the extraneous cultural issues in word problems. I was on the ETS math GRE panel for a while. ETS tries very hard to do it, and their tests are relatively high quality, but still there are many cultural biases hard to eliminate. ETS does a lot of "validity testing" which I don't think the regents exam is subject to---i.e. no matter how hard you try to think from the student point of view, you can't really tell how students might interpret or stumble or misinterpret a question until you try it out on them. One of the complaints about the regents exam is that it is only NY, so the test writing companies aren't financially motivated to put much effort into the test. It's not necessarily as predictable from year to year as other standardized tests.

In the juice container / straw instance: do the students in question actually encounter juice containers like the ones described? Do they interpret the question to mean you actually try to squeeze the straw through the hole into the container?

In other common sorts of questions, do the students actually play or at least watch baseball? What is their common sense notion about the typical size of a house? What variant of English do they use everyday? I once had some students who were struggling with word problems in calculus ... it turned out the issue was things like "needle and thread". Even though they spoke fluent English they were from Indonesia and terms like this which are everyday words for some people were unfamiliar. The math itself was easy for them, and with a little personal interaction they did well in the end.