In my current edition of Journal of College Admission, I read an article titled "Gender Inequities in University Admissions Due To The Differential Validity of the SAT". The article attempts to explain the gender inequity in higher education and seems to blame the SAT for that difference. The hypothesis is that the mathematical portion of the exam is biased toward male test-takers, therefor unfair to female test-takers, which in turn effects the type of institution that each sex would be admitted to.
Males generally score 35-50 points higher on the quantitative portion, where the English and reading portions of the exam are pretty even. What or whom is to blame for the disparity? The author of this article says it is social cultural norms. This is a much better answer than what was given 30 years ago....genetic differences. The author also indicates that there is a threat to girls for doing well in math, so some of the reason they may not do well on that section of the SAT is purely psychological (clearly a more reliable study is needed here). A more scientific explanation for modern gaps could be that geometry, statistics and data analysis are the areas where high school men tend to outperform women. More than 40% of the quantitative assessment is in these areas. So, women are already set up to underperform on the SAT compared to men.
What I do not understand is where the author seems to get the idea that women are under-represented in higher education these days. Hasn't everything I have been reading of late talk about the reverse? In fact, I just completed "Why Boys Fail", an entire book about the fact that men are not entering colleges at the rate of women. So, I am a little unclear on what the author of this article is referring to. He could be talking about certain types of institutions where men are more likely to enroll than women or perhaps it is certain academic majors that are more likely to admit men than women.
This was the backdrop for my final blog. Are there gender inequities in certain majors? Being that my employment experience has been at a school that specializes in education and health care (fields typically dominated by women), my institution has historically been 60/40 where more women are enrolled than men.
One of the points in this article was that College Board, who is the company that authors the SAT, apparently admits that the quantitative portion is geared to those skilled in certain elements of mathematics. The areas that it measures however are not deemed to be the most important indicator of college success....so, then why ask these questions?
I really have not ever understood the point of standardized testing, and prior to a meeting I attended earlier this month, I might have been among the first to say that college admission should not focus so much on the scores of these standardized assessments. However, I had the opportunity to go to a College Readiness workshop conducted by ACT, org. I learned a lot at this session. Specifically, I learned about how the different scores translate to having met certain competencies. For anyone who does not remember the scoring of the ACT, it is on a 36 point scale. Science reasoning, English, reading and mathematics are evaluated. What I did not know prior to this workshop was that a student scoring a 14 on a certain subject was actually only meeting the competencies of an 8th grader (as determined by the ACT, Org., of course).
The admissions director at a public institution in the state of Colorado, has quite a bit of flexibilty to admit students with varying scores. Students are admissible based on a high school gpa as well as their test scores. If a gpa is higher, there is more room to have a slightly lower ACT score and vice versa. I have seen students be admitted with scores hovering around that 14 mark for a composite score. This means they are at 8th grade knowledge. Is it a disservice to admit them into college? I am now starting to think that it is.
But, is it just the proposed gender inequity mentioned above that leads to lower scores? There has been speculation about cultural sensitivity and lack of culturally reposnisive questions on those tests as well. So, I guess , more than anything, I just find myself wondering about the future of standardized tests. Will they change? Will we change? Will they always carry the weight that have in the college admission process? Some research shows that fewer colleges and institutions are requiring these scores. Only 75% of then require the SAT score in 2010-2011, according to the article.
I guess we will wait and see!
Michele,
ReplyDeleteI find both of these ideas interesting and great discussions pieces. I actually wrote my paper for the 761 class on the gender gap of learning for males and females. I find these numbers that were mentioned in your article somewhat confusing as well. There is obviously a difference in the learning styles of males and females, but to throw in standardized testing as well is a different topic. What about the issues standardized testing, SAT namely, being blamed for focusing more on the middle and upper class and leaving out the lower class for parts of the test that were being mentioned or terms being used. Or the SAT being focused more towards Caucasian students? I went to a SAT prep class as well, and it still didn't help me. I am a horrible test taker, and I believe tests like that don't really test your knowledge, but how you take tests. Do I think the will ever go away, no, but I do think they will continue changing to find the true nature of what someone knows. They did add a writing component to the SAT a few years back, signs of a changing time.
Interesting topic Michele. While I too struggle with idea of one standardized test holding so much weight in a student's future; perhaps part of the gender gap is a result of a self-fulfilling proficy. I remember hearing from adults from an early age that boys were good at math and girls were good at reading. Imagine my confusion when I struggled to excel at reading and outperformed my male classmates in math. While there may be some tendency for boys and girls to do better in certain subjects, perhaps the test scores we see are because we are telling our boys that they need to focus on math and girl on reading and writing.
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