“Who is saying that females at MIT are less capable than the males there?”
I am, actually. At least on pure math, which is all I feel qualified to opine on. See my reasoning above.
Some posters in this thread have been claiming that these test scores are purely based on genetic intelligence, and that genetic intelligence is associated mostly with race and secondarily on SES. So the 7 times difference in NMSFs in SJ versus SF, with similar race and SES demographics, does not match these claims.
GPA and 6-year completion is not all about raw math smarts. Factors that influence GPA and grad rate would typically include executive function, completion of work that may seem like busywork, effective degree planning, and interpersonal skills.
@CaliDad2020 and @ucbalumnus - “But often these Math SAT score debates miss the forest for the trees: GPA is often as good if not better as an indicator”
GPA is going to be utterly meaningless at the level of CalTech or MIT, except perhaps to indicate that the applicant is willing to sit in class. (Many talented math kids aren’t - true story I know a few 3rd graders who refused to sit in regular math classes in a California elementary school, the school excused them from class except for required tests and let them work out in the hall, and by 6th grade one of the group had placed out of precalculus and every math course up to it.)
Also, don’t dismiss the idea that teachers can be very vindictive against the most talented students. Lowell High School in San Francisco, for instance, and every public elementary and middle school in the city, absolutely refuses to accelerate talented kids in math, all for political reasons. It’s no wonder that smart parents or parents with smart kids flee SF or go private. At Lowell, the only high performing magnet high school in SF, the admissions criteria for non-minorities are so capricious that even a single B on your transcript can put you right on the selection edge. And the standardized test bar is set so low that way too many kids qualify, making the dreaded single B the effective gate. If you have a smart kid in SF public elementary and middle schools, do you really want to bet the kid’s future on some union teacher’s whim - especially if your kid is a whole lot smarter than the teacher?
The low number of NMSF in SF is really no mystery to those who understand the dynamics.
There was a link to an Ohio State College of Engineering report a page or two back. Here is a link to the most recent such report:
https://engineering.osu.edu/about/report
Ohio State also provides additional support for women in engineering:
A lot of engineering departments are doing the same thing. Trying to do whatever they can to attract, retain and graduate more women in engineering. At least in part, those efforts help explain GPA and graduation rate differences (in addition to other factors noted here by others).
I know a lot of male high school grads who had marginal chances at engineering who went in with that as their major. Not sure I know any female high school grads who did that. The female high school grads I know who went into engineering are/were strong candidates. I also know a lot of female high school grads (my daughter included) who totally have the aptitude for engineering; they just have no interest.
Incorrect. GPA (and SAT/ACT scores) are meaningful in that numbers more than slightly below the maximum indicate a low likelihood of success at Caltech. They only become meaningless when comparing applicants at or near the maximum possible.
Math acceleration is offered in SF high schools: http://www.sfusd.edu/en/curriculum-standards/math.html
All of what you claim are disadvantages for SF students in the PSAT are environmental factors, which you dismiss the significance of compared to genetic factors in other posts in this thread.
Here’s an interesting statistical analysis of math achievement differences between males and females at the very right end of the curve. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
There is a difference between genetic lines and racial lines… to beat an old stereotype to death, there are asians that are good at math and asians that are not good at math. There is a finite possibility that the distribution of asians that are good at math is greater in SJ than SF. Can’t disprove it, and can’t prove it. You can discuss the likelihood of this being true or not, but the NMS results are a datapoint than support it taken at face value. However, using racial demographics as a predictor of SAT results relies on the assumption that there indeed are strong fundamental relationships with racial genetics and academic ability which I do not believe given most people’s life experiences. An interesting piece of data might be the number of immigrant families in the two cities… I have a feeling that SJ has the higher percentage. Which leads to…
The one thing that is hinted at but not touched upon is the “cultural” element behind this (and this goes beyond SES). Given your social/cultural environment is one that celebrates academic achievement, or deems it a necessity, there is an increase in achievement. The success of Nigerian students in academic achievement in the US/UK is a good example of this, and I think it is a safe assumption to lump asian achievement into the same kind of bucket.
@ucbalumnus - So, with respect to Lowell and the other high schools (all of which are low performing), you consider the possibility that if the student doubles up one year and then reaches calculus by 12th grade to be acceleration? What do you propose to do with the 8th grader who has already scored a 5 on the AP Calculus exam? I can tell you there are dozens of those kids in the Bay Area.
You might be interested to know that public magnet high schools in NYC like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are able to offer up to four years of post-AP Calculus to their most talented students. Not coincidentally, NMSF at Stuvesant are approximately 160 versus about 12 for Lowell - even adjusting for size, Stuyvesant is more than 10x Lowell. Any insights into why that might be?
About genetics and what one should expect, one needs to understand that there are people throughout the intelligence distribution in every race and ethnic group. Their relative frequencies differ, as do the means and variances, but it is never as simple as equating race composition with phenotypic intelligence in any population. I have posted numerous links in the past to texts and papers, so no need to go through that here. You are arguing against a strawman for effect, or you don’t understand the literature.
About environmental effects on NMSF in SF, I am not sure what you are arguing about anymore. Many in the “top half” of the intelligence distribution leaves SF when the kids are ready for school, disproportionately in relation to genotypic intelligence of the city as a whole, as in almost every urban school district in the United States, because intelligence tends to generate enough income in our society to allow flight. That has happened in SF, just as in every other city in the post-war period. The return of highly intelligent, young tech workers to SF is unlikely to change genotypic intelligence in the school age population soon because their children are not old enough yet and/or their parents have already decamped for leafy green suburbs in Marin or points south and east. (It remains to be seen whether in the future the recent influx of highly intelligent tech workers will remain to have their children schooled in the SF public schools - and, of course, private schools are relatively small, do not select for high intelligence generally, and so will have only small effects.) How are these environmental factors?
How would you explain the outperformance of the South Bay schools in the absence of higher genotypic intelligence as an explanatory variable? It can’t be income, otherwise we would see many NMSF in Marin (which we don’t). Also, Stuyvesant, at 10x+ NMSF compared with Lowell has similar numbers of students at the poverty level (about 40%). It can’t be simply parental educational attainment, or we would see that in Marin or in that study regarding parental educational attainment and LSAT scores disaggregated by race. Last, it can’t simply be about race, as you have noted that at least there is some comparability between SF and the high performing districts to the south.
I know, you probably think we “underfund” urban schools and that we just need to spend more money… Same old, same old, and ignores decades of experience that funding is basically meaningless beyond the basics. Go back and read some history and note the outperformance - similar to the Asians today - of poor Jews in NYC at the turn of the last century, with very low SES, in barebones schools and living in ghetto conditions.
“Given your social/cultural environment is one that celebrates academic achievement, or deems it a necessity, there is an increase in achievement. The success of Nigerian students in academic achievement in the US/UK is a good example of this, and I think it is a safe assumption to lump asian achievement into the same kind of bucket.”
Absolutely. But in some ways this is a chicken and egg situation. And it is dependent on intelligence, in the sense that only intelligent populations can really celebrate academic achievement. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing in the genotype to the extent that the population practices assortative mating and endogamous marriage. This is the story of Ashkenazi Jews as well as of the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria, to name a few outliers, but to some extent has been practiced by all groups for tens of thousands of years. Culture becomes encoded at the genetic level over time. This, more than anything, explains why it is so difficult to change “culture” and why we tend to see similar behavior from distinct groups regardless of where and when they appear.
I’ve often recommended the “10,000 Year Explosion” by Cochran and Harpending and I’ll throw out another recommendation again here.
Also, I second the recommendation above of the very witty and readable work of La Griffe, who was widely speculated to have been an academic at Johns Hopkins and who used to post anonymously for obvious reasons (sadly, the posts stopped). http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/
LOL, because Stuyvesant is a test-entry school and NMSF is determined by a test so people who are good at tests do well on both…
^^ Isn’t Lowell a test-entry school as well? Perhaps things have changed.
@OHMomof2 - you’ll note that I didn’t bring up NMSF this time! lol…
If you prefer Nobel Prize laureates as a measure of achievement, the NYC elite public schools have more than most countries.
You can also look at the amazing achievement of certain open enrollment NYC public schools in the past. Google “DeWitt Clinton High School” and note the outsize contribution that its graduates have made in all walks of everyday US life. That school was perennially “underfunded” and massively overcrowded.
Students make the school, not the other way around. DeWitt Clinton is still around, now surrounded by metal detectors. You don’t even want to know how much money is wast…, ermm, I mean spent per student there today.
@chippedtoof - Times have changed. Lowell was the subject of all sorts of lawsuits in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the result that it was saddled with a Rube Goldberg-esque admissions system; the ability and reputation of the student body are not what they were. Still pretty good, though. The best that SF has to offer, and if you can’t afford to leave…
"Just to wrap up on math ability being selected at MIT, I would bet the farm that if MIT released the results of real achievement milestones at this rarified level, male scores will be demonstrably higher than female scores in the admittee pool. AMC12 and AIME scores, and USAMO qualifications are the gold standard analogs in the high school world to the Putnam in college. Lore in the competition world is that 80% of USAMO qualifiers are accepted if they apply to MIT. The sex ratios are not disclosed explicitly anymore, but they skew 80%+ male at these levels.
Anyway, fun discussion on the thread, I hope some ideas get traction. "
This is exactly my point! “Raw” math ability is NOT a good predictor for College success at MIT!!
That’s what I’ve been saying. The SAT Math (and other SAT/ACT folks) conflate two things.
It’s like footspeed for Wide Recievers - sure, top level footspeed is critical for NFL wide receivers, but if you select your wide receiver based soley or even mostly on 40 dash times, you will, in most cases, not pick the best player.
That is exactly what I’ve been arguing: Math SAT (or any SAT) is not the best indicator of College Success, which is what Adcoms are supposed to be selecting for.
What about colleges where 97% of the kids don’t have 700+ on SAT math? Any why are we only talking about SAT math scores? Why not verbal scores or the ACT test sub-parts?
Uh… no. I am not the only one. In fact, the entire idea that SAT scores can “better” predict college success makes a HUGE deal of a persistent 30 point difference. That’s kinda “by definition.”
Just look at some of @SatchelSF research and you will see where the folks in the “real world” of top level college admissions often swim.
Here’s the simple version:
If SAT scores are a “better” predictor (or even if GPA + SAT scores are a “better” predictor) and if F consistently (on average) have a 30 pt. lower SAT Math score any program that overweights SAT Math will - (if not balancing for gender) select more M than F DESPITE there being clear evidence that women will perform BETTER in some college enviroments, despite = or lower Math SAT scores.
In reality, UCSD, OU and MIT should “reverse-engineer” the “adcom equation” in an attempt to re-calibrate score discrepencies between genders to achieve an equal GPA/graduation % number (I understand it does not “really” work like that, but if it were an attempt to get “optimal” GPA and grad rates, MIT, UCSD and OU would likely need to “raise the bar” on their M admits GPA.)
Of course, colleges are not exactly trying to create the recipe for students by gender that cooks the highest performing and graduating class numbers. But when the studies that say “SAT is better predictor!” use FYGPA as the standard for success of SAT in selecting students, we have to at least use that (SAT should really us Graduating GPA and graduation rates, but they’re too lazy!)
“GPA and 6-year completion is not all about raw math smarts. Factors that influence GPA and grad rate would typically include executive function, completion of work that may seem like busywork, effective degree planning, and interpersonal skills.”
Exactly the point: if Math SAT (and/or SAT, SAT II, ACT) are not great predictors of success - except perhaps in the margins, why not look for tests/data points that are better predictors?
That’s my entire argument: These tests are not really adding much to the application and in some cases distort it, and they are expensive and time consuming and exclusionary and soul-crushing for many students.
What is a little hard to understand is all the folks bringing up things to indicate college success that are not simply “college success.”
It’s pretty simple really. If your goal as an Adcom is to determine who will succeed in college, the metric is there for all to see: Who graduates in 4 or at least 6 years, what their GPA is and, when applicable, what their post-grad track is.
Why look at anything else?
If you want to know how fast your car is going, you don’t need to determine how fast a plane goes or how fast your car will go if you strap an Acme rocket to the roof. Just read the speedometer.
Do you have any suggestions here? What tests/data points should colleges be looking at that they are not already evaluating?
As long as you keep expecting colleges to treat external costs as internal costs, I expect you will be frustrated with the process.
The report that you keep citing for Ohio State college of engineering (which you cite as OU and which represents less than 1/5th of the total undergrad enrollment for the university) reflects less than 100% graduation rates in 4 and 6 years. So they are clearly missing something. Help them out here. Its all so simple according to you.
“It’s pretty simple really.”
The schools need to be able to evaluate the applicants both subjectively (i.e., GPA) and objectively (i.e., SAT or ACT).