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From: jan@oas.olivetti.com (Jan Parcel)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: SAT scores - sexist?
Message-ID: <49600@ricerca.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 91 21:14:44 GMT
References: <1991Apr9.203133.2551@aero.org>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: O'Reilly and Associates Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 51
Approved: ambar@ora.com

In article <1991Apr9.203133.2551@aero.org> al885@cleveland.freenet.edu writes:

>Does anyone know of any good examples of why the SAT exams are biased
>toward a male point of view? I have heard many feminists and cases about
>it, but I have yet to see any examples. Most arguments point out that 
>since women do better in High School and collage, this proves that the 
>higher scores of male students on the SAT's make them sexist.

NOW had a pamphlet about this.  I don't have it, but I remember a few
points.

    1.  The purpose of the SAT is to predict the person's college grades.

    2.  For the same grades, (I don't remember if this was math-specific
	or not), the SAT has recently been under-predicting women's
	grades by some 20 points ( I don't remember the number) in the 
	math section , i.e. if a man gets 640 and a woman gets 620 on the 
	SAT, they will perform the same in college.

    3.  This was not always the case.  When there were word problems, a
	man and woman of the same ability would score the same, but the
	man would do better on multiple-guess, and the woman on the
	word problems.  Then they eliminated the word problems.

>I am not saying women CANNOT do this type of work, I'm saying women are
>choosing not to. I am also not about to give the reasons why. Whether
>they are intrinsic to the female character or are purely placed by
>society is a question I can't answer.

The point is, that women CAN do the work, and the current SAT's hide
this.  In fact, given that women perform better on word problems, one
could argue that is is possible the MEN cannot do the actual work,
once it gets real.  But somehow, y'all have been muddling through
anyhow, so I will assume that men may also have abilities that don't
show up on the SAT's.

As to the question of what is intrinsic to the female character vs.
socialization, it will take a while to find out.  It will take even
longer to find out what types of problems, teaching methods, and
"problem structures" will exist when women have had time to become
equally responsible for the design of schooling and work and the
economy, etc.  It's possible that there are a lot of areas that are
optimized for male style, maybe 90% social and 10% physical, but until
another 1000 years have passed, we won't know how to optimize for both
men and women in designing the way things are learned and work is done
in the world.

~~~ jan@orc.olivetti.com   or    jan@oas.olivetti.com  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We must worship Universal Consciousness as each of the 5 genders in turn
if we wish to be fully open to Yr glory.
						-- St. Xyphlb of Alpha III