Truth, gender, and the SAT

Abstract

T ~ h e public relations campaign against the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as depicted the test as a defective product that limits the educational opportunities of women. Female high school students score lower than their male classmates on both the verbal and math components of the test, and this gender gap is said to disadvantage women unfairly in competition for scholarships and admission to selective colleges. According to the Center for Women Policy Studies (CWPS), the publishers of the SAT are guilty of consumer fraud because the test underpredicts the college grades of women students. This means that women find the test more difficult than men, but when it comes to getting good grades, the really important criterion according to CWPS, the women do better than the men. And since women get higher grades, they should score higher on the SAT, and would, if the test weren't biased. If these statements were true, the lower SAT scores of women could reflect some bias in the test and modification would be in order. However, the allegations are false and their framing shows such a determined avoidance of fundamental facts that what now ought to be debated is not the gender gap but rather the truth gap. The first erroneous allegation concerns grades. In order to make the claim that women get better grades than men, we have to ignore both the evidence that grades vary widely according to subject matter and that course-taking differs by gender. A's and B's are common in art and music, and women take more of these courses. Women also get higher grades in these generally more easily graded courses. The situation is the opposite in mathematics, where A's and B's are much harder to attain and men take more courses than women. Men get slightly higher grades in these tougher-graded courses. A more accurate statement of the facts about grades is this: in high school and college, women generally take easier courses than men and their grade point averages are slightly higher as a result. Each year, students who take the SAT report their high school grades by academic subject. Each year the College Board publishes the results of these self-reported grades and the tabulations are consistent. Girls report higher grades in art, music, English, and languages; and boys report higher grades in math. In spite of these reliable differences, groups assaulting the SAT refuse to acknowledge that grades and grade point averages are influenced markedly by academic subject and choice of courses. If they did, they would lose a major weapon in their propaganda war. The tendentiousness of feminist groups on this question of grades and SAT scores is also shown by the fact that another, equally plausible explanation is