Card File Explanation - LD September/October 2019 Standardized Tests

By Allie Landecker

The latest card file we released was for the September-October 2019 LD topic: In the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized testing in undergraduate admissions decisions.Click here for the link. And as always, please feel free to Facebook message GirlsDebate with any questions.

AFF

A lot of these cards can be used in similar ways. The general thesis of most of them is that standardized testing is biased against women. A great way to use these would be to mix and match them, and use them as an advantage area for a soft left aff - just throw in some impact cards or framing cards and you’ll be set.

Below, I’ve provided a more in depth explanation of specific cards and arguments.

ST =  Gendered

The Au 09 card focuses on the enforcement of standardized testing; decisions about testing are made by state or federal government authorities, who are predominantly male, and thus use them as an excuse to impose their own political agendas at the classroom level as opposed to allowing teachers, who are predominantly women , to make classroom decisions. This reinforces masculine values such as the view of objectivity as rational and public, as opposed to irrational and private, a dichotomy often the subject of feminist critique. 

ST -> Exclusion

Most of these cards address how standardized tests themselves are biased against women because of the subjects that the tests focus on as well as the format of the test questions. The Johnson 19 card argues that even though women do better in class in subjects like math and science, they do worse on standardized tests in comparison to men. There are multiple reasons for this. First, characters on standardized tests are mainly male, and people do better on tests that reflect themselves. Second, women do better on tests with more time due to the fact that they are more likely to fully think through a problem whereas men are more likely to guess, resulting in higher scores. Most of the other cards are similarly straightforward, as they also question the ability of standardized tests to accurately portray the intelligence of women. 

ST = Sexist

Most of these cards are really similar to the ones above- a lot of the Fairtest 07 warrants are similar to the Johnson 19 warrants mentioned above (i.e. things like time constraints, guessing, etc. make standardized tests biased towards men). 

Stereotype threat

Again, a lot of the warrants in the cards here are similar to the cards above, although they’re more specific to how stereotypes within tests can negatively affect the performance of women. The Elsesser 16 cards points out that if a group is presented with a stereotype of themselves on a test, they’re more likely to do worse. These kinds of stereotyping are common on standardized tests-  one of the cards talks about a passage in the verbal section talking about how a woman's place was in the home. 

AT Reforms CPs

There’s only one card here and it’s pretty basic. Right now, research can’t fully explain why women, especially women of color, do worse on standardized testing even if their grades are higher. This makes reform impossible - if you can’t identify the cause, how can you reform it?

NEG

Education Reform Fails

These cards are mainly about how the education system itself is systematically biased against women. The Perry 16 card talks about how education reform will be ineffective unless we address the education system as a whole and stop ignoring underlying causes that affect young girls of color. Just “closing the gap” between men and women isn’t enough- we need to look at the root cause of these issues in order to create substantive change. Similar sentiment is echoed in the Teitelbaum 89 cards, which talks about how standardized tests are a reflection of the education system itself and therefore cannot be changed until the education system as a whole has changed. This can be used as a solvency deficit for the aff.

ST Doesn’t Create Bias

These cards are directly countering a lot of the aff ground about how standardized tests are gendered. The Sommers 2k card, for example, makes two primary arguments. First, there are currently more women in college than men, meaning that the performance gap on standardized tests doesn’t matter in terms of college attendance rates. Second, more women from lower income homes take standardized tests than men, and income level has strong correlation to testing scores. 

Holistic Admissions Worse

The DeBoer 18 card talks about how a holistic approach disproportionately benefits affluent people because parents with more money have the ability to send their kids to do more “impressive” extracurriculars, whereas poorer parents may not have the resources to pay for certain extracurriculars and often  rely on their children to help watch their siblings. Essay are also easier to prepare for than standardized tests, meaning affluent students have an advantage over poorer students because of access to college counselors.

AT Stereotype Threat

The APA 06 card is citing a study that disproves the stereotype argument affs will likely make. According to the study, when researchers told women there was a gender gap in test scores, women performed worse than men. However, when researchers told women there was no gender gap, women still performed worse than men, but the gap was relatively smaller. Thus, they concluded that part of the problem is not the tests themselves, but internalized misogyny. However, this card is obviously not an ideal answer because in both groups, men scored higher than women.

Reform CP

There are a few counterplans here. 

The solvency advocate for the first one is the Danaher and Crandall 08, who advocate for not making students fill out demographic questions before taking the test, thus inflating women’s scores and decrease men’s scores. This counterplan would seem to solve any aff that has an advantage area about women doing worse than men and can be read with most disads. 

The Schonberger 13 card advocates for a guessing penalty, which would solve aff advantage areas that focus on how men do better on standardized tests because they are more likely to guess than women. 

The Teitelbaum 89 card is advocating for a gynocentric model of testing (one that prioritizes feminine values). Ways of doing this would be for colleges to admit larger groups of students to place less emphasis on individualism and competition and eliminating multiple choice tests; this would probably work best with a disadvantage as a net benefit, but would also solve functionally all of the aff’s ground regarding how tests are gendered because men are more competitive.