<p>Asians usually outscore all ethnic groups on standardized exams, including the SAT.</p>
<p>Yet, on the critical reading portion, whites outperform Asians (and all other ethnic groups for that matter). Though the gap isn't too significant, it does exist. </p>
<p>How do you explain this gap? Do you think that lack of English fluency is partly at fault?</p>
<p>I think that it isn’t a lack of student fluency (those that score well are probably fluent) but familial fluency. The language of choice at my house, at least, is Mandarin, and even among friends’ families that speak English, as first-gen immigrants, all parents universally prefer Mandarin. I would wager that A-A students may be, as a whole, exposed to less higher-level English fluency in their home environment, esp. from a young age. Anecdotally, I also had a sizeable portion of friends who were perfectly fluent (but shy) at Kindergarten registration be streamed into ESL, which also affected total-English fluency, since the language in the CR is highly formal.</p>
<p>I don’t think that being Asian should be an excuse for not doing as well on the CR section… Being an Asian American girl, I’m going to do whatever I can to destroy this stereotype.</p>
<p>Oh no he de’ent!</p>
<p>Being Asian ISN’T an excuse for not doing well…it’s just that the average score for Asians in CR happens to be a bit lower than the average score of white people. I feel like as purpleacorn said, it’s partly due to familial fluency. Because many more Asians are first generation immigrants from places that don’t speak English compared to white people, many more Asians live in a home where another language is spoken predominantly (speaking anecdotally of course, I don’t have any statistics for this). Thus, the higher level of English that is tested on the SAT may be slightly less natural/familiar for them. Why this isn’t true for the Writing section…I have no idea XD</p>
<p>:o It’s okay, i’m an Asian and I got an 800 on that section.</p>
<p>So I wanted to check the facts and see how wide the performance gap is between Whites and Asians for the CR section. Here’s what I found based on the stats posted by the college boards on the 2012 college bound seniors (Source: <a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-by-Gender-Ethnicity-2012.pdf[/url]):”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-by-Gender-Ethnicity-2012.pdf):</a></p>
<p>Mean CR Score -
White: 527
Asian: 518</p>
<p>So Whites do a little better than Asians on average.</p>
<p>However, when looking at the percentile ranks for the 2 groups, we see that there is a higher percentage of Asians who score on the higher end than did Whites. </p>
<p>CR Score/ percentiles for Asian (for scores 600 and above):
800 / 99
750 / 96
700 / 91
650 / 83
600 / 72</p>
<p>CR Score/Percentiles for White (for scores 600 and above):
800 / 99
750 / 98
700 / 94
650 / 87
600 / 75</p>
<p>The percentile is the same (58%) for both groups for the score of 550. For the population who score below 550, Whites tend to do better than Asians.</p>
<p>Nice use of fact checking, InLibris!</p>
<p>Cultural background is a notable factor in performance, so a family that encourages their child to read and infer more from his/her readings would naturally help their child perform better on a CR test (especially one in the same language). Furthermore, a family that speaks English tends to have the benefit of understanding the language better. Nonetheless, while being a second-gen has its drawbacks (Chinese-speaking parents for me like many of the posters above), there is no reason why an individual might beat the average. The statistics InLibris found shows this trend, and anecdotal evidence comes from my own 800.</p>
<p>I’m Asian and I just finished grading practice test #1 in the Blue Book.
Here are my results:
Math - 680
Writing - 630/660/670 (8-10 on essay)
CR - 580
Total - 1890/1920/1930</p>
<p>Last year in 7th grade I was doing better in CR only because I wasn’t exposed to a lot of the Math concepts, but as I learned more Algebra & Geometry, my score skyrocketed while my CR score pretty much stayed the same. My guess as to why Asians do worse than Whites on CR is that they prefer one, unequivocal answer. In Math, all you have to do is “plug and chug,” as my Math teacher calls it, in order to get the correct answer. However, in CR, there are many different interpretations of the questions. Generally, Asians aren’t very freethinking, so that may be a contributing factor to the low scores. My friend, who’s in the same grade as me, scored a 1940 in 7th grade. Good score right? But, the only reason why he broke 1900 is because he’s exceptional at Math–he got a 740. But, that must mean the sum of his writing and reading scores can’t exceed 1200, or 600 pt. a section on average.<br>
Another thing about him is that he’s TERRIBLE in language arts (we’re still in 8th grade, so it’s still called LA :)); he barely scraped an A this quarter of school.</p>
<p>From this thread, it seems as if cultural influences cause whites to outscore all other ethnic groups on that section.</p>