What else does Educational Testing Service do to ensure fairness?
It also includes questions in pre-testing sections before they are used in a section of the SAT that counts toward a score. Then, it conducts statistical analyses to examine the difficulty of each question and its relationship to student’s total score and other questions. It conducts Differential Item Functioning (DIF) studies to determine how different groups of students (gender, ethnic/racial groups) perform on each question during the pre-testing. To avoid using questions that are more difficult for one group than another, ETS compares the performance of females and racial/ethnic groups with the performance of white and male students of the same ability. It assembles each form of the SAT to minimize group differences across all questions and to meet test specifications of the number and type of questions required at each level of difficulty. Next, special committees of trained high school and college educators review all questions and tests before they are used operationally. These
