Black students from two cities and Mexican-American students, both male and female, showed small but consistent tendencies to perform better, relative to White groups, on three nontraditional measures: tests of inductive reasoning, spatial scanning, and associative memory. These measures showed somewhat less discrepancy between the groups than did…

Student test scores are increasingly used to judge the competence of the educational enterprise. Exaggeration of scores is the result of directing attention away from the individual student achievement to the average scores of schools, districts, and states. Implications and recommendations are discussed. (BJV)