Testing Bias

Testing Bias consists of the distortion of tests in order to advance liberal falsehoods or demonize conservative truths. Liberals control public schools and heavily influence the writing and grading of tests given to students nationwide. As a general rule, the SAT II subject exams are the most biased, followed by the biased SAT I verbal exams, followed in bias by the AP (non-math) exams, and the CLEP exams are the least biased (see below for discussion of the CLEP exams).

The College Board provides this as one of nine official sample questions for the sentence completion portion of the important "Critical Reading" SAT I exam:^[1]

Joshua's radical ideas were frowned on by most of his coworkers, who found them too ------- for their conservative tastes.

(A) heretical

(B) meticulous

(C) precise

(D) incoherent

(E) sagacious

The two contenders as correct answers are "(A) heretical" and "(D) incoherent." Conservatives, who based their arguments heavily on reason, would select "(D)" as the correct answer. Indeed, conservatism is not a religion and most conservative criticisms of liberal policies are based on their incoherence. Yet the College Board, in a subtle disparagement of conservatives, insists that only "A" is the correct answer. This question and answer rewards students who view conservatives with disdain, while punishing conservative students who recognize the incoherence of liberal positions. Note also that even the phrase "conservative tastes" is demeaning to the intellectual foundation for conservative principles.

The bias is so obvious in this question and answer that it is apparent even before an objective reviewer checks to see what the College Board considers to be the correct answer. It does indeed consider only "A" to be correct, and "D" to be incorrect. Missing that question probably costs a student 10 points on his SAT I verbal score, which could make the difference between winning and losing a scholarship or gaining or losing admissions.

The CLEP Microeconomics exam is biased in omitting important concepts like the invisible hand, free market, charity, transaction costs, the time value of money, interest rates, the Coase theorem and Gresham's Law. Each of these concepts tend to lead students toward truthful, but conservative, conclusions. The CLEP Microeconomics exam also downplays certain topics like opportunity cost, asking less about them than it should.

The questions on this exam about government regulation are heavily biased. The CLEP exam pretends that government regulation can make a market more efficient. This is untrue, as proven by the Coase theorem, but the liberal view is that more regulation is somehow good, and that government can somehow make a market more efficient.

Pollution is a "negative externality," but the CLEP exam writers cast this issue in terms of an efficient use of resources. Under the CLEP (liberal) view, pollution is inefficient because it results in inefficient harm to the environment. Laws against pollution supposedly increase efficiency by preventing harm to the "resource" of the environment. These regulations that prohibit pollution cause less output but supposedly ensure a more efficient use of environmental resources. In fact, government regulations almost never improve efficiency; the free market does that best without government interference. That said, you can pick up one or two easy points on the CLEP exam by assuming that environmental regulation increases efficiency by protecting the "resource" of the environment for its better uses. See Economics Lecture Fourteen for further discussion of this.