The Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, Form U, is scored in two ways: number-correct and pattern. The latter makes use of the information about which particular items are answered correctly, giving more weight to the more discriminating items and making allowances for guessing. Critics have suggested that black students are penalized by pattern scoring on the ground that they tend to guess more than others. For this study results for two tests at each of four different levels (and grades) of the battery were used. The two tests were Reading Comprehension and Mathematics Concepts and Applications. The data used were drawn from both the 1980 Fall and 1981 Spring standardizations of levels D, F, G, and H of the battery given at grades 2, 4, 6, and 8 respectively. A comparison of the mean differences between the two types of scores for blacks (n=4760) and others (n=25,280) did not support the contention that blacks are penalized by pattern scoring. (Author/PN)