<p>The 8 NMsemifinalists at S's large suburban NY public HS were announced yesterday. They were all male(including him)!! I thought this was interesting as 5 years prior, D's year they were mostly female, and the years since seem to be in that proportion.</p>
<p>It's my understanding that, historically, over half of NMSF's have been male. </p>
<p>In general, the "upper tail" 700-800 region of the PSAT/SAT math and verbal tests have relatively more males than females. The disproportion is more marked in math than in verbal, but it exists in both.</p>
<p>Originally the PSAT/NMSQT had only a math & a verbal section. Back in the 1990s, there was protest because boys were over half of NMSF's even though girls had higher school GPAs (in both high school and college.) When the writing test was added to the PSAT in the 1990s, it was hoped that this would "balance the scale" towards young women. However, the results did not turn out that way. Boys also scored higher on the writing section.</p>
<p>In general, boys have a tendency to do better on standardized tests, while girls tend to have higher GPAs. Perhaps this balances out a bit when things go to NM Finalist stage, since a checkered grade record (or disciplinary record) is the most common reason for failure to progress from semifinalist to finalist.</p>
<p>Even so, I doubt the numbers are THAT far off 50-50 for the overall national population. (Maybe 55-45.)</p>
<p>Of course, in any given school, there are statistical "small-sample" issues, so it's quite possible to observe "outlier" extreme cases like all boys or all girls. If you flip a coin 16,000 times, even if it's pretty close to a 50-50 perfectly fair coin, you will sometimes get strings of 8 heads in a row and other times get strings of 8 tails in a row.</p>
<p>Then too, results within an individual school may not be i.i.d. (independently and identically distributed) like serial coin flips. There can be interdependence effects (e.g., one may have a bunch of boys--or girls, who are strongly competitive with one another and egg each other on, or friends whose aspirations inspire one another, etc.)</p>