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gher than those who
took the test with the standard instructions. What is surprising is that the nonstandard
instructions seem to differ little from the standard version. For example, the instructions on the
standard version read “behind the sofa,” while the nonstandard version asked the child to
mark a picture of something that was “in back of the couch.”
The Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (the BITCH test) was Williams’ next
experiment in designing a culture-specific test for African Americans. Williams administered 100
vocabulary items, selected from a slang dictionary and his personal experiences, to a group of 200
sixteen- to eighteen-year-old participants, half of whom were African American and half of whom
were white. On this IQ test, the whites got lower scores, an average score of 51, compared to an
average of 87 for the African Americans.
As Williams demonstrated, psychologists can develop a test that favors a particular group rather
easily. However, the problem that has confronted the designers of tests is how to design a test that
will apply to all groups fairly. Moreover, after the test is designed, how do we best use the data it
provides?