In my district if your FISQ IQ is <129 you are bright and if it is >130 you are gifted, minorities are gifted at >120.
I think that's a violation of civil rights laws. One group scoring below another on average does NOT demonstrate that the test is biased (and should therefore be "adjusted" in the manner you described). I understand that you are describing a practice, not endorsing it.
Not if the base test can be shown to be biased using non-verbal IQ tests and longitudinal studies of who does well in school. I think this is the case for some tests.
In addition, many of the tests, like the SAT, do not distinguish very well among the top performers past a certain point.
A number of tests do use scales now. The National Merit exam has the hard score then a separate category for minorities that is scaled within that minority group. You can be 99.0 percentile for all seniors and 99.99% among Hispanic seniors.
Here is why I think there is room to make an adjustment.
I am fortunate to work with some very bright people. Many were born outside the US and English is not their birth language. Few would probably score over 600 on the SAT Verbal, but they are phenomenally smart and easily outperform those with high SAT verbal tests.
A hired hand I once worked with from Mexico, who could barely speak English, could fix anything that ever once worked and he could also play any musical instrument. How do you ID someone like this? He is now 75. When he was a boy, he must have been something else. But his upbringing was a village in Oaxaca. In a different world, he would have gone to Caltech.
One of my friends grew in a tiny village in the middle of no where without running water until he was 13. He went to a formal school about that time and it took off from there culminating with a summa cum laude in Computer Science from a Tier 1 US school. Had he taken the SAT when he was 17 and still on his steep learning curve, he would have scored in the 600s.
In a strict world with hard cutoffs in lieu of thoughtful consideration, he'd still be digging wells with his bare hands.
Obviously, it seems fair to somehow adjust the playing field keeping in mind the need to perform at a high level with other students.
