John Rosenberg has a sharp essay on Minding the Campus regarding the use of “stereotype threat” as an argument in favor of using racial preferences in college admissions.

John is skeptical, because “stereotype threat” appears to be contradicted by the evidence: SAT scores for minority students do not underpredict actual college performance. I’d add this point. How do we know that this alleged difficulty — doing less well on the test than you really could because you are worrying about making “your group” look bad — doesn’t also apply to other students? Asian students generally do very well on the SAT, but isn’t it possible that some of them don’t do as well as they otherwise would if they didn’t have to worry about being regarded as failures if they don’t get an utterly stellar score? After all, among themselves they speak of a B as “an Asian F.”