Obama: Man of change, man of … raised test scores?
Researchers from three top American universities think so.
Since last Fall, teams from universities like Northwestern and San Diego state have studied what they call the “Obama Effect” — “the elimination of a performance gap between black and white Americans in an academic test.”
Teams gave tests to a group of 84 black and 388 white Americans (proportionate to U.S. racial percentages) four times throughout the 2008 campaign and election season: two “non-salient times,” one week before the National Convention and one month before the election, and two “salient times,” the day following the National Convention and the day following the election.
In the “non-salient times,” the white subjects scored an average of 12 out of 20 questions correct, while black subjects had 8.5 correct answers. But during the two “salient” tests, given immediately after Obama’s nomination acceptance speech and after his election victory, black performance improved, researchers said.
So far, professors and race studies experts are split on how true they believe the tests to be. But Northwestern University enrollment officers say they’ve seen a 21 percent increase in black applicants this year.
“It certainly sounds plausible,” said Marx, one of the lead researchers of the study. “Obama is really getting a lot of people excited and I could see how that could translate into more minority students applying to schools.”
Comments
Leave a Reply
Comments that do not abide by our Comments Policy may be deleted.
Feed for College Ave.