SAT Percentiles By Race

[SaintSaens]

<p>First, the reason the SAT writing section was created was so the UC wouldn’t cut its donations to the College Board.</p>

<p>There’s a sex gap in both the SAT and the ACT. It’s smaller in the ACT. For some reason men tend to do better on them than women. I don’t really think it’s a big problem, since women are doing much better in the areas that matter more. More men than women drop out of high school and more women are applying to college and more hold bachelor degrees.</p>

[silverturtle]

<p>

I don’t really think it’s a big problem, since women are doing much better in the areas that matter more.

</p>

<p>Given the SAT’s predictive purpose, does this not render the disparity a greater problem?</p>

[monstor344]

<p>

First, the reason the SAT writing section was created was so the UC wouldn’t cut its donations to the College Board.

This is true…But the Writing section was also pragmatic for the purpose I previously stated. See below.</p>

<p>

There’s a sex gap in both the SAT and the ACT. It’s smaller in the ACT. For some reason men tend to do better on them than women.

“For some reason” can be pinpointed.
[Men</a> and Women Really Do Think Differently | LiveScience](<a href=“http://www.livescience.com/health/050120_brain_sex.html]Men”>Men and Women Really Do Think Differently | Live Science)

The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white…
…The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.

Now, the old SAT was probbably supposed to be a wash: men were supposed to do better on math, and women on reading. But perhaps through the way the test evolved, or perhaps because the reading section is acutally somewhat mathematical and logic-based in its approach, men do slightly better on the reading section while at the same time doing significantly better on the math secion. I believe that, in order to get rid of the composite score disparity (as well as other reasons), Collegeboard added a writing section that obviously favors skills more commonly associated with females.</p>

<p>Regarding the difference between the SAT and ACT: the SAT is an overall more reasoning-based test while the ACT “tests what you know.”</p>

[Ryan537]

<p>bump ^ ^ ^</p>

[Lunatic]

<p>Yeah, the disparity between the scores of the different sexes is almost entirely, at least on the SAT, due to the math section.</p>

<p>The differences discovered b/w the way the brains of men and women work definitely ring true to the overall paterns I have noticed in the real world: men tend to use abstract reasoning better, while females tend to multi-task better.</p>

[michiganfall]

<p>This thread is very boring.</p>