<p>originaloog,</p>
<p>That was the impression I got, the X factor that is left undefined. I'd like to better understand the X factor to understand why there is such a difference.</p>
<p>Marian,</p>
<p>I am waiting for the same stats to come out n the 2400 point SAT. On the 2 part test the boys, on average, score better than girls on both parts of the test. However, within the high schools, the girls are doing better than the boys GPA/classrank wise. Not sure why there is a distinction. Is it maturity? Teaching styles? Something else? Not sure.</p>
<p>most of the difference in average sat scores between males and females is due to the large disparity in the numbers of each sex taking the test. as such, and given the high correlation in verbal and writing scores, i wouldnt expect females to outscore males on the writing section.</p>
<p>that said, the addition of the writing section will make aggregate scores (after accounting for the additonal number of females taking the sat, who would be, on average, lower scorers) quite similar... depending on the numbers used, i worked out the average male score of 1564 to a modified female score between 1559 and 1568. goodbye, apparent gender bias.</p>
<p>as for why males are not currently successful in school, thats the question of the hour. is it genetic/chemical? if so, thats opening up a can of worms. is it social? that leads to a much easier solution, one that needs to be addressed in many of the same ways as womens educational issues decades ago. i have a fear that it might be a bit of both.</p>
<p>ericabucknell,</p>
<p>I am not sure I understand what you are saying or how you are calculating your numbers. Right now males, on average, score higher than the females on both the writing and the math sections of the SATs. If there is a high correlation between the verbal/critical reading and writing section then males should score higher on the 3 part test.</p>
<p>Today this breaks down as follows:</p>
<p>Girls Average SAT scores:
505 Critical Reading
504 Math</p>
<p>Boys Average SAT scores:
513 Critical Reading
538 Math</p>
<p>For more on this see the National Report at:</p>
<p>Gender weighting is absolutely an issue in college admissions becuase I believe the National Merit rankings put extra weight on the Verbal scores (double?) in order to give girls some chance at parity.</p>
<p>If they didn't do that, the majority of National Merit Scholars would be boys.</p>
<p>I'll probably get flamed for this, but I favor gender weighting. Short of putting everybody back into single sex schools, nobody has yet figured out how to fix the cultural and social dynamics that result in girls competing for male attention, and males tending to favor "compliant" partners--D and her smart ambitious friends have lots of male friends, who are also smart and high achieving, but these high achieving boys date sophomores, who are also smart but are a little younger and less accomplished. Girls date or marry up in terms of brains, status, and economic advantage, and boys tend to date/marry down. </p>
<p>I do not think it is healthy for anybody for there to be a significant gender imbalance where there are two girls for every guy on a campus. Combine that with the fact that the guys tend to go for less threatening girls and you have a big social competition among the girls for male attention. Who wants that? It is really unhealthy for everybody.</p>
<p>
[quote]
However, within the high schools, the girls are doing better than the boys GPA/classrank wise. Not sure why there is a distinction. Is it maturity? Teaching styles? Something else? Not sure.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I wonder if part of what goes on is that many boys don't equate achievement with getting perfect grades and following the rules. Achievement/status among boys is measured differently, and often achievement in athletics or pursuits outside of the classroom trump any academic achievement. Young men measure themselves in terms of strength and courage at least as often as they do brains. Even adults have a different standard for boys, it seems. The male star athlete is often given more attention than the male star student... the male star athlete often outshines the female student, or female athlete, or even the female who is both. </p>
<p>I taught the first and second grades. Most little boys came to school wanting to be firemen, policemen or sports heroes. The importance of reading and writing skills are not readily understood by young boys who want to be supermen when they grow up. Some of these superheroes do become students as well, if they happen to be academically inclined. But if it's at all hard for them, sometimes the effort just doesn't seem worth it.
Little girls often wanted to be teachers, doctors , vets, artists and sometimes scientists, like marine biologists - all dreams compatible with school curricula. When I taught 20 years ago, the girls wanted to please the teacher MUCH more than the boys did. The boys wanted to please each other. I wonder if it's still that way.</p>
<p>Another reason guys have traditionally done better on the SAT is that MC questions favor them. Girls tend to want to work a problem out from beginning to end, whereas guys are less risk averse and so they are more willing to guess...they can move through the test more quickly and have more time to complete it.</p>
<p>It still bugs me that we only seem to hear about "gender weighting" when girls dominate in a particular situation.</p>
<p>The original poster showed us an article about girls outnumbering boys in the Chicago college prep high schools, where admission is based on a combination of test score and GPA. Yet I don't see a similar fuss being made about boys outnumbering girls (60:40) at New York's Stuyvesant High School, where admission is based entirely on an exam. At the college level, liberal arts colleges make efforts to maintain "gender balance" in admissions because if they didn't, women would dominate. But nobody seriously suggests that engineering schools, where men dominate, need to strive for a 50:50 ratio.</p>
<p>Why is it that the predominance of one gender is only a problem when that gender is female?</p>
<p>Marian, I disagree with a couple of your points.
[quote]
It still bugs me that we only seem to hear about "gender weighting" when girls dominate in a particular situation.
[/quote]
I think both Title IX and the increased verbal content of the SAT were implemented to increase girls' access to sports and selective colleges.
[quote]
But nobody seriously suggests that engineering schools, where men dominate, need to strive for a 50:50 ratio.
[/quote]
If you examine admissions data for schools like MIT, Caltech, RPI, Harvey Mudd, I think you'll see significantly higher acceptance rates for girls over boys, even with comparable test scores and GPAs. Admissions ARE weighted toward girls in those types of schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I am not sure I understand what you are saying or how you are calculating your numbers. Right now males, on average, score higher than the females on both the writing and the math sections of the SATs. If there is a high correlation between the verbal/critical reading and writing section then males should score higher on the 3 part test.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>basically, you cant just look at the raw numbers like that because a much higher percentage of females take the sat. the additional females are not normally distributed because virtually everyone at the top already takes the test... so the 'additional' girls are coming from the bottom. how close to the bottom its hard to know, hence the range of adjusted scores i provided.</p>
<p>you can see this playing out pretty well when you look at schools with average sat scores below 1000. theyre dominated by females. it has nothing to do with females being unintelligent but rather everything to do with their male counterparts in that range simply not going to college.</p>
<p>Marian,</p>
<p>As sjmom points out "gender weighting" already occurs is both directions depending upon the school. As a general statement (you can find exceptions) liberal arts schools gender weight to attract more males, engineering schools gender weight to attract more females.</p>
<p>ericatbucknell,</p>
<p>Not sure you can just drop a certain group of females like that. Alternatively, look at the number at the high end of the scale, with fewer males taking the test than females there are more high scoring males than females.</p>
<p>My sense is that the curve distribution of males is flatter than the curve distribution for females. In some respects that could support what you are saying, the boys at the bottom of the flatter scale were dropped from the equation. However, it does not fully explain the higher number of boys at the top of the distribution.</p>
<p>Regardless, whatever "objective" measure you try to apply there will always be those that find those measures subjective. Clearly the Chicago schools have criterea that are not purely SAT test based.</p>
<p>(BTW, in the quote you used from me I meant to say that males currently score higher than females on both the M and CR sections not the M and W sections. But it appears that you understood what I meant.)</p>
<p>Who said engineering schools aren't trying to achieve a 50-50 parity? I think many are, with varying degrees of success and varying degrees of commitment. I think the engineering schools have something of an uphill battle in attracting women, just as ex- womens' LACs like Vassar and Skidmore and Sarah Lawrence have obstacles to overcome in attracting guys.
Marian, MIT has definite gender weighting toward girls - less each year, but girls still have an admission's advantage.</p>
<p>As a woman with some success in what was a male-dominated field when I started AND as a parent of both a boy and a girl, I think that gender parity in a residential college setting is at least as laudable a goal as having college classes that reflect the ethnic, racial and socio-economic make-up of the country. Perfect parity or a perfect reflection of society is wildly unrealistic, but I think Firewalker's solution of just merit, while fair, will eventually lead to worse gender imbalances than we have now.</p>
<p>I believe that males also score higher on the PSAT and therefore there are more male qualifiers for National Merit Scholarships -- can't remember where I read it, but the stats are probably on the College Board website somewhere. It has more to do with than just that there are more females taking the test resulting in lower female averages. There is a higher distribution of guys scoring near the top.</p>
<p>
This seems very sensible to me. All of the (very good, by the way) arguments in favor of affirmative action for URMs and kids from lower socio-economic ranks apply to gender as well. The benefits of going to college with people from a different geographic region or ethnic background are as real as attending a school with a reasonable gender mix. Actually, the disparity of genders at some engineering schools is why I encouraged my son to look at a different set of schools. Havind attended an all-male high school, he would not have been happy at a predominantly male college.</p>
<p>Having stated my support for "mitigating factors" for SE status, race and gender, I will say this - I heard a quote on NPR the other day that very accurately summed up the downside. It was a soundbite from an African-American politician running for some office in Michigan "Affirmative action in Michigan now, Affirmative action in Michigan forever" - Huh?! As an apparently educated black leader, does he really want his childrens' children forever in a situation where they "qualify" for affirmative action?</p>
<p>I have, as a lifelong believer in merit, come around to the notion that diversity and reflecting the larger society is probably a good thing in a residential college setting where young people, young leaders, are trying on new identities, but I still think that the formulae for how to get there, who is being helped and hurt and what that all says about the institutions to the kids they are trying to serve, needs to be examined every year, with every class.</p>
<p>
I wonder if part of what goes on is that many boys don't equate achievement with getting perfect grades and following the rules. Achievement/status among boys is measured differently, and often achievement in athletics or pursuits outside of the classroom trump any academic achievement. Young men measure themselves in terms of strength and courage at least as often as they do brains. Even adults have a different standard for boys, it seems. The male star athlete is often given more attention than the male star student... the male star athlete often outshines the female student, or female athlete, or even the female who is both.</p>
<p>I taught the first and second grades. Most little boys came to school wanting to be firemen, policemen or sports heroes. The importance of reading and writing skills are not readily understood by young boys who want to be supermen when they grow up. Some of these superheroes do become students as well, if they happen to be academically inclined. But if it's at all hard for them, sometimes the effort just doesn't seem worth it. Little girls often wanted to be teachers, doctors , vets, artists and sometimes scientists, like marine biologists - all dreams compatible with school curricula. When I taught 20 years ago, the girls wanted to please the teacher MUCH more than the boys did. The boys wanted to please each other. I wonder if it's still that way.
Good post. For boys in high school (esp. public high schools) it is cool not to do the homework and to not try very hard. The difference in genetic makeup of males vs. females is negligible; it is simply their attitudes toward school.</p>
<p>8 1/2, thanks for making that point. Articles about this topic always talk about how classrooms today favor girls but the truth is, classrooms and teaching really have not changed very much in the past 40 years or so, and many of the changes have been made with friendliness to stereotypical boys in mind (incorporating more motor activity in lesson plans, for example). I think it's more about how the rearing of boys has changed.</p>
<p>Boys and girls simply develop in different ways and at different rates. </p>
<p>The problem is that, increasingly, we're putting kids on tracks early in their careers - tracks that ultimately shut the doors to opportunities down the road. </p>
<p>I, for example, was one of those "stupid" boys in the 7th and 8th grade. I was considered one of the poorest students in my 8th grade class, and in the 7th grade had mostly D's and C's in a big public junior high in a nice, pleasant and small university town in the west. I was lucky in the 8th grade to have a great teacher, Mrs. Bassett, who helped me find my legs. I was able to raise myself to a B student - by the second half of my high school junior year.</p>
<p>Had I been derailed - sent to sit with the dumb kids, shut out of the mainstream of my high school - I would not have been able to blossom during my years at a pretty-good liberal arts college. And a lot of very smart girls would not have been made to feel inadequate when I shot well ahead of everyone in the neighborhood while in graduate school at Duke.</p>
<p>I think we've gone horribly wrong and to see how women on this board have hardened their hearts to the plight of the boys suggests to me a sad disregard for the public good.</p>