“There have been a few studies showing that test scores are the biggest predictor of admissions for selective colleges, but of course not 100% correlation.”
I think that is because the Highly Selectives put more weight on gpa and EC’s, and let a good number of great test scores pass by. The Selectives tend to rapidly snatch them up to show good stats.
@hapsworth “the only way to eliminate all special consideration…—is to reduce all to GPA and test scores.”
It is interesting that, overall, men would be big losers in that event. I suspect that the number of men at top 50 colleges would fall immediately and significantly. The boys grades, on average, are not as good in high school and they are not as good in college.
I don’t think anyone would be happy. Brown and Vassar would be way out of balance.
“@notigering: " of stem male victims, as usual, these characters think so much of themselves and their superior “talents” that they even write manifestos! filled with cherry picked data .”
@notigering: “I didn’t say that white and Asians men were writing manifestos.”
You’re a walking contradiction."
How is that? For all I know hostile sentiments towards women in stem (very easy to expand beyond stem…) knows no race boundary. My answer to you was that mysogistic expressions are not limited to particular race groups (such as white and Asian men…). The term manifesto again I used loosely (figure of speech) to mean written expressions (such as articles, books, religious citations, long forum posts, google memos etc…) that stupidly claim that men are better able to perform certain tasks, stem in this case, than women . Don’t know why you are resorting to insults either?
@Much2learn “It is interesting that, overall, men would be big losers in that event. I suspect that the number of men at top 50 colleges would fall immediately and significantly. The boys grades, on average, are not as good in high school and they are not as good in college.”
Men do slightly better than women on standardized tests than women, I agree that women have higher GPAs so it’s usually a wash. For 2013 seniors from college board, men averaged 1512 to women’s 1486 (2400 scale). Men may be losers but it wouldn’t be Asian men for sure, they’d benefit a lot, but yes I could see white and urm males be impacted if it were just gpa/test scores.
“I think that is because the Highly Selectives put more weight on gpa and EC’s, and let a good number of great test scores pass by. The Selectives tend to rapidly snatch them up to show good stats.”
Well ok but highly selective colleges have higher test score averages than selective ones, in some cases much higher. So they love high test scorers as well and need them to balance the lower test scores so they can also look good for the rankings. Let’s take two schools in the same city, NYU, selective, middle 50 SAT is 1920-2180, Columbia, highly selective, is 2160-2340. I’m going to venture that selective average is 2000, highly is 2200.
There are two things that an admissions director looks awt when comparing to his or her peers - RD yield, and average test score.
@Much2learn that is an interesting proposition.
According to this - https://forms.act.org/research/researchers/briefs/pdf/2014-12.pdf men have quite a bit lower GPAs (3.07 vs 3.24) but near identical ACT (20.95 vs 20.86).
I can’t see them not taking rigor into account though. More women in AP classes than men also.
Admissions decisions in Europe are based almost entirely on academic merit. It’s not obvious the US holistic process is superior.
@OhioMom2 "According to this - https://forms.act.org/research/researchers/briefs/pdf/2014-12.pdf men have quite a bit lower GPAs (3.07 vs 3.24) but near identical ACT (20.95 vs 20.86).
I can’t see them not taking rigor into account though. More women in AP classes than men also."
While I agree that women on average are better academically, I don’t think it’s as sharp as you’re making it out to be, especially at the top end of the applicant pool.
Where is the GPA data coming from, is it from high schools or colleges that are reporting it by gender, are these the self reported ones the students put when they took the test? Where’s the data that women take more APs than men coming from, the AP organization, high schools? I tried to look for the sources in the pdf and couldn’t find them.
From the College Board, but it really depends on which test you are talking about.
Overall, 2.1 million AP tests taken by males in 2016 vs. 2.6 million tests taken by females:
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2016/Program-Summary-Report-2016.pdf
But, by which subject:
https://www.reddit.com/r/APStudents/comments/69i4za/percentage_difference_in_gender_number_of_people/#bottom-comments
Boys and girls have different curves. The average girl does better but both the high end of achievement and the low end have much greater distributions of boys. This is one of the best established facts in the literature. So please no comments about sexism. But keep in mind no female has ever won the Fields Medal and only a couple the Nobel in physics or chemistry. Long ago this could be blamed on society but the same has been true the since 1970’s when many women were educated in science. Larry Summers however paid the price for saying this in public. But of course most of the prisons are filled with men and men are disproportionately homeless as well.
Sorry there is one recent winner as a private poster was quick to correct me but that doesn’t change my point.
Over 50-1 and unlike the Nobel Prizes it’s awarded very young. Really.
Here we go…
Intelligence variability is not gender-dependent
Why the Greater Male Variability hypothesis is not an established fact.
“…I will not deny that there is a great deal of support for the GMV hypothesis … but because the studies that support it, especially the famous study of Scottish children, come from societies steeped in gender norms that favor the results the studies produce, it would be disingenuous and premature to consider the case closed in the face of a stubborn body of evidence that supports a totally different conclusion.”
This is a discussion only about the extremes of intelligence and not normal smartness(IQ 120-145). At the genius level in hard science the data is conclusive. But of course we are talking about the tiniest segment of the population. The Fields Medal 50-1 data is conclusive.
What I countered were the studies that supposedly show precisely what you are saying.
You wrote, remember?:
“…the high end of achievement and the low end have much greater distributions of boys. This is one of the best established facts in the literature…”
Care to share those “best established facts” with us? No, Fields medal data are not conclusive. Correlation and causation are different things. Read the article I linked to above.
I’m sorry, but being at the 99th percentile in math is nowhere near good enough to win the Fields medal.
That article you listed makes one glaring mistake by comparing studies that look at children. Men have a much longer mental maturation period than females, so comparing academic results and then using that result to generalize amongst the adult population is inaccurate.
Just because you were at the 99th percentile in intelligence in elemntary school and middle school does not mean you’ll continue to be in the 99th percentile in adulthood.
At elementary and middle school, being at the 99th percentile in math is about memorizing a bunch of simple formulas and then plugging and checking.
I find it hard to believe that memorizing the formula for the volume of a cylinder shows any sign that an individual has the intelligence to study Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra and Topology.
That article you posted mentions that there are more Asian girls with math ability at the 99th percentile than Asian males using 4th and 8th grade data.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf
According to above paper from college board, Asian males have a Mean of 611 with a Standard Deviation of 123. Asian Females have a Mean of 584 with a Standard Deviation of 125.
Overall, the distribution is N ~ (514, 118)
A Z-score for 99th percentile for Gaussian Normal Distribution is 2.33.
Solving for X:
(X - 514) / 118 = 2.33 → X = 788.94
For Asian boys, a 788.94 implies a Z-score of:
(788.94 - 611) / 123 = 1.44555
For Asian girls, a 788.94 implies a Z-score of:
(788.94 - 584) / 125 = 1.63952
This shows that as the Asian kids grew older, the Asian boys surpassed the Asian girls at the highest math level, and now Asian boys are more likely to be in the 99th percentile than Asian girls. Based on my experience, the gap grows further as both boys and girls age. Remember that the SAT is taken by mostly 16-year-olds, and that men continue developing mentally well into their mid-20s.
In conclusion: Don’t use elementary and middle school performance to predict how individuals will perform in adulthood.
Who cares about the fields medal?
This particular tangent of the thread is about admissions admitting by gpa & test scores only and how that would affect the gender balance at selective colleges.
The top 50 colleges and universities in the US accept more than 50k students a year. Let’s just stipulate that all the fields medalists who are seniors in high school are getting into one of them.