<p>that’s only part of what got him fired. the other things that contributed were how he treated cornel west (why i hate him the most) and a multimillion dollar law suit the university had to settle with the government on his behalf. if you want to hate him there are plenty of reasons to hate him and i would encourage you in that hate but his remarks in the speech about women in science that caused controversy were <em>not</em> poorly supported. there are many more reasons to not like him but that’s not really one of them - because he made a bad argument or misinterpreted the evidence. the problem there was not that he was wrong but that he was an idiot if he didn’t anticipate the public outcry presenting that hypothesis would cause. distressing implications don’t have to be lies to be distressing. a lot of people who had a say in his termination as president probably already didn’t like him before he said those things, and maybe they thought there was merit to the hypothesis or maybe they didn’t, but the fact that it was so unpopularly received could be used to get rid of him. after he said that who was going to defend him? a lot less people… </p>
<p>halcyonheather: “The community” is kind of generalization, because I think most people gave honest and open minded opinions/answers. I know that most CCers are really smart people, but some treated the discussions as if there’s a final, 100% true answer. Some seemed too hung up on being correct, like they were maintaining their ego, maybe because they’re used to be right all the time. I never noticed that attitude before, that’s all.</p>
Thus statement is based on what? Intuition? Tests in school are based more on memorizing material, and even when it isn’t straight regurgitation teachers usually give students a good idea as to what will be on the test. The SAT, on the other hand, generally tests a different set of skills. So I would submit that your premise these should be correlated is incorrect.</p>
<p>I haven’t read through all the posts, so maybe this has been said already.</p>
<p>The bigger question is how a study conducted in 1997 can be remotely relevant in 2013. The test has been redesigned at least once since then. And all the women who took the test in 1997 are noe either succesful or unsuccessful entrepreneurs, surgeons, farmers and homemakers.</p>
<p>Jesus christ. Some of the women on this thread are making women look terrible. Fighting averages with anecdotes?? -____- That’s like saying “there’s no way the average on the test was a 50! I got a 100!” It is based in fact that there are differences between women and men on average physically, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be true for how our brains work since everything is physically based. Just because you don’t fit the norm doesn’t make the norm not true.</p>
<p>From what I get in school, guys, including smarter ones, seem to be more lazy than girls when it comes to doing the work and getting the grade. The scores of girl would correlate better with their grades, while for the most part, I think guys would score higher than their grades would predict.</p>
<p>A girl from Shawnee Mission East in Kansas (in case you want to verify) scored a perfect 2400 first sitting as as a junior January 26, 2013. It seems that much of the opinion on this thread has not considered the original prompt with enough depth of thought and questioning. It is also troubling that the first poster called the NYT writer “this Wolfe chick”. It is offensive and shouldn’t be done. Ms. Wolfe should be referred to as a writer, and if you disagree with what she says, then say you disagree and explain why you disagree.</p>
<p>We can’t ignore that more boys than girls avoid college. </p>
<p>Per the National Center for Education statistics:
Males enrolled: 7.8 million
Females enrolled: 10.4 million</p>
<p>Is it possible that the 2.6 million extra females who take the SAT are <em>not</em> those who would have taken it except that they were pushed to go to college? </p>
<p>What I would like to see is a correlation between IQ scores and SAT scores based on gender. I don’t think there is any way to determine gender bias without removing any other potential factors.</p>
<p>Conversely, if females do so poorly in comparison, how do more go to college?</p>
<p>PS - my GPA had very little correlation to my SAT, AP, and professional licensing scores. I was not top 10% of my graduating class and did very well on all the standardized tests I took, including a 5 in an AP class I barely got a C for the whole year of the course.</p>
<p>Great insight and research Patton370. A few weeks ago the NYT had a lengthy NYT Magazine article on the subject of why there still aren’t more women in science, and the research showed that it is not because of lesser intelligence but is cultural, some by choice (women sometimes choose parenting as their major role) and some by way of thick glass ceilings. Harvard recently completed a second study showing that when genders are changed on applications, most often the applications with mens names are chosen even when an app with a female’s name on it was equally or even better qualified for the job.</p>
<p>I usually follow these posts quietly but I must wade in on this one. You all raise some interesting points and I agree with many of them. I’ve been raising SAT scores for 20 years and have come to the conclusion that the gender differences are due to the fact that teachers and the SAT folks require you to play two completely different games. Young women work hard, memorize the material, and regurgitate the information that teachers reward. Young men apply reasoning skills required on the SAT better than young women. The good news: once young women learn the requisite reasoning skills for the “SAT Reasoning Test” (yes, that’s the real name of the test), they kick the guys’ tails on the test. They just need to avoid using some of the strategies they use in school and adopt some new ones for the SAT. No big deal.</p>
<p>I haven’t posted on CC in ages but this is an interesting discussion. I’d just like to point out (redundantly, most likely) that we should consider the cultural attitudes facing girls and boys re: college. In my experience, it has been much more culturally acceptable for a young man to drop out of high school or plan against going to college and instead go into a trade, start a business, or work in industry, etc. Girls, on the other hand, are expected to at least try to attend college, and those who drop out are almost always seen as failures (whereas boys in similar situations can be given a pass if they have other plans for their life).</p>
<p>I think this would lead to more girls taking the SAT (which is a known fact), but also more under-prepared or academically-disinclined girls taking it, since they’re often expected to go to college regardless – whereas academically-disinclined boys are more likely to drop out (since that’s an acceptable choice for them).</p>
<p>Getting into this thread late - I know I’ve never heard this theory - men may perform better in tasks where they have to respond quickly. That’s supposed to be why men do better in the timed competition to get onto “Who wants to be a millionaire”. That would explain why they do better in school but not as well on the SAT.</p>
<p>High school is obviously biased if girls make better grades than boys. This is expected since most teachers are female. Female teachers favor girls and spend more time with them.</p>
<p>Also, high-school teachers are, on average, racists since white students, on average, do better than blacks. The cause-and-effect relationship is clear.</p>
<p>The “Education Reform” industry loves these discussions - it’s what keeps them in business!</p>
<p>Perhaps the problem is not the SAT but high school grading bias. Is it possible that teachers like girl students better or girls are more likely to be more interactive in class discussions so their grades get biased upwards? Add to that the genetic differences in male and female brains ie. right and left brain dominant, socialization bias, (risk taking, aggression, etc) and perhaps that explains the differences.</p>
<p>I’m a female that got a higher GPA (not highest, but certainly among the highest) and got near perfect scores on both the ACT and SAT. I know that in my experience, girls are a lot more book smart and can rattle off and memorize things with ease. Girls are the ones taking notes and making flashcards. Guys, on the other hand, seem to not care about grades as much but do understand the material inside and out. I think when it comes down to it, even intelligent high school guys are still just teenage boys and don’t put as much effort into schoolwork despite knowing the material just because of laziness. Girls, though, look for organization and stability and the short term satisfaction good grades bring. I knew an incredible amount of girls that were in all AP classes that couldn’t tell you why you perform this function or what the meaning of the story truly is, just a lot of notes and dog eared pages. I think that explains more of why girls get higher grades rather than why they get lower scores, but I do believe teenage boys are more intelligent than most of their grades would lead you to believe. Maybe it’s because they care more about the social stigma attached to a kid with good grades? Or maybe they just don’t care enough?</p>
<p>I just browsed through this topic, and it appears all about the SAT. However, the SAT is only one test used for college admission, and the types of analysis skills it requires may be different from the ACT. Does anyone have info about gender differences on the ACT? I’m betting that, since they are different types of tests, girls probably do better in relation to guys.</p>
<p>This is coming from a self-proclaimed feminist, but men have higher IQs than women; hence, they score higher on tests, including the SAT. Grades, on the other hand, tend to measure work ethic more than actual cognitive ability, and this seems to be one area where women exceed men. The SAT is not “sexist”, just like the SAT isn’t “racist” when East Asians prove to have higher scores than Whites and all other races. It’s just the way things are.</p>
<p>(For the record, I myself am female and more of the “smart but lazy” type. I have terrible work ethic and hand in assignments/papers late all the time, but when it comes to tests and exams, I always score very high.)</p>
Are we assuming that the male:female ratio for these circumstances is 1:1?
I have no idea of the distribution of the USA’s current ages of pre-college students, but I would venture to guess it’s not evenly down the middle.</p>