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From: fester@wolf.cs.washington.edu (Lea Fester)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: SAT scores - sexist?
Message-ID: <1991Apr11.043308.16202@beaver.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 91 21:15:38 GMT
References: <9104091559.aa26744@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
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Approved: ambar@ora.com

In article <9104091559.aa26744@orion.oac.uci.edu> schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (SamLord Byron Choi) writes:
>Let's not make too much of this topic.  That males score better on

I understand not wanting to get into something you consider trivial,
but it really doesn't make sense to address a point yet request that
the thousands of other readers refrain from doing so.  Please don't
debate this :-).

>s.  I would say that far more than gender
>biased, they are culturally and intellectually biased.

That is the point.  The test unquestionably IS culturally biased, and
the culture gap between women and men is a canyon wide, so women get
screwed by the cultural bias in the test.  Being moderately familiar
with a culture is not the same as being a member of that culture.  Men
and women exist within two different cultures, although as a
disadvantaged group women DO have to be somewhat familiar with the
male culture.

While I "have the floor," I'll tell you what REALLY pisses me off
about the ETS exams.  Besides the fact that they always happen on the
first day of my period, so that as a woman I have to deal with the
additional cultural bias that says that although almost every restroom
for men built in the United States is equipped with urinals, important
institutions such as those having enormous influence over an
academically minded person's future do NOT need to account for
physiological differences if they engender FEMALE needs, i.e. besides
the fact that four fucking times in the last four fucking years I've
taken the GRE while in moderate to awful pain, what pisses me off
about those exams is that they call their non-math, non-analytical
section "verbal".  Because the skills they test there are basically
analytical skills in a psuedo-verbal context.  And I've stood in line
for those exams and heard women tell each other in frustration that
they can't get good scores on the "verbal" even though they believe
themselves to be highly verbally skilled.  And I have done worse on
quote verbal unquote than my roommate who is highly analytically
skilled, but whose verbal facility is far inferior to mine.  And I
have heard computer science professors note with amazement that the
verbal tends to predict academic success for PhD candidates better
than the math does.

Gee kids, what a surprise.  Yet women around the country, many of whom
are probably like friends of mine in college who offset negative
feelings about their relative inadequacy in fields like math by taking
pride in writing extremely well and being incredibly articulate, these
women are effectively told that their (pride&joy) quote verbal unquote
skills aren't as good as they thought, maybe not even as good as el
geeko next door.

I have no argument with using a test that is an accurate predictor,
assuming it really is accurate.  But pretending that the "verbal"
section assesses verbal skills is a real slam to many people,
primarily women.  Rename the section "linguo-logo- games," or some
such.

Leaf, who's always thought computer games were incredibly boring