The objective of this article is to explore reports of unfair results for African American
and other minority students on the SAT. Specifically, we studied the correlation
between item difficulty and differential item functioning (DIF) values (i.e., African
Americans tend to perform better in harder items and White students perform better in
easier items) reported by Kulick and Hu (1989) and Freedle (2003). Both investigations
used the standardization approach to study DIF.1 In contrast, we will use item response
theory (IRT) methods.