Having served as an educator, administrator and admissions officer, I am obliged to note that the practice of "gender norming" in college admissions is hardly new.
It is the dirtiest little secret in higher education, primarily because it operates in favor of young white male applicants in the form of quotas. Without this practice, nearly all of the elite, historically male colleges would be more than 80 percent female.
March 24, 2006
"It is the dirtiest little secret in higher education..."
That's a quote from one of the letters responding to that article about discriminating agains women in college admissions that we were just discussing. One Vaughn A. Carney writes:
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Daryl Herbert
But how do the admissions offices know that all these guys are so brilliant? SATs? Grades?
I suggested in the previous thread that part of the problem is that K-12 had become so female oriented that getting good grades was getting harder and harder for guys, in comparison to girls.
One example I used was that homework had become so important in many classes that even if a guy gets the highest test grades in the class, he can end up with a B or C in the class if he doesn't get in his homework. Back in the 1960s, when I was in high school, I would often get an A in the class for doing that.
From a guy's point of view, if the purpose of homework is to learn the subject matter, then if he can get an A on the tests (and, in particular, if he can get the high grades), without doing the homework, then homework is make-work. And, on average, girls are IMHO significantly better at doing that sort of make-work in order to make their teachers happy with them.
That the guys may be brilliant is really irrelevant, or, maybe even counterproductive. My experience is that the smarter the guys, the less willing they are to put up with arbitrary BS (like make-work homework that they see as wasting their time).
So, how do the colleges identify those brilliant guys? From a combination of grades and SATs? No, because often their grades are lower than those of girls with comparable SATs and IQs. But if the schools actually hold their grades to a lower standard, then they are doing what that article suggests - giving them preferences.
I don't believe the 80% number for a second.
Two out of three parts of the SAT section are verbal though, and that is surely a way to pull female scores up. But men are still better test takers. But women do have better grades than men in high school. That is an indisputable fact.
But I have no problem with discriminating against women. Striving for a 50/50 sex ratio seems like the right thing to do. If you're a female, you have a much easier chance of getting into MIT or Cal Tech than if you are male. So it works both ways.
Since when is homework easy?
I was in the top 1% of my high school class, and I can't recall one person finding homework easy. If you did - you were obviously in the wrong class.
The AP classes are extremely challenging. And homework involved reading novels, writing 20-page essays, doing science experiments, etc. You couldn't skip that stuff and still expect to ace the exams, unless you were an Einstein.
Maybe it was easy back in the 1950's, but not anymore.
So I don't buy the homework excuse.
I think it's obvious why girls do better than men in high school. Not because women are smarter, but because they try harder. Plus, men have a stronger sex drive (especially as a teenager) and that has got to be more distracting to them than it is to women.
Already the faculty is 97% non-male.
Dave, bravo.
These confident statements about the differences between men and women in school are way overblown. I too spent my high school years blowing off homework and acing exams, and I wasn't an anomoly among the girls I went to school with.
Now, as an instructor, I have women who have to be prodded to do the work, who show up for the quizzes and think that's good enough, and men who are on time with every little thing.
Boys have managed to do their sums, copy, memorize, work their problems on the board, and so forth, for generations. I think there's a lot of romanticizing going on; Ann's pointed out the "women do it better" meme that crops up in comparisons of men and women. I'll propose the "men just need to be free" meme that seeks to blame "excess feminization" for problems with numerous sources.
geoduck2 (and to some extent Elizabeth) --
I went to an above-average suburban high-school in a wealthy predominantly Jewish school district. I almost never did my homework, despite being in every single AP class the school offered and then some. Thankfully my teachers didn't care very much since I always scored as one of the top handful of students in the class, and then aced the AP exams as well. About 90% of the girls I went to school with did all of the homework they were assigned. About half of the guys did, the others did not.
Yes, meeting deadlines and doing your work is important. But even in good schools (aside from your Exeters and Andovers), even in the challenging AP classes, the classes are just not terribly challenging. What is the point of doing the homework? For busy-work? Exeter and Andover are more challenging than probably 75% of all colleges in this country. So of course, there, boys do do their homework because if they don't, they won't know the material.
Anyway, there definitely are schools where not doing homework is heavily penalized and boys tend to (in my experience) feel the brunt of the penalization).
As for downtown lad --
Yes, essays are technically homework, though I would classify them as projects. By homework I (and I think others) mean doing dozens of rote exercises out of the textbook for math, physics and chem, doing a little fill-in-the-blanks sheet for your history/social studies class, etc. That kind of day-to-day stuff, not just major papers and projects. I know of places where this day-to-day minutia accounts for upwards of 40% of a student's grade.
Elizabeth: "I'll propose the "men just need to be free" meme that seeks to blame "excess feminization" for problems with numerous sources."
Good point. Feminism has traditionally gone after such assertions, which I remember as being very common in the 60s.
> 80%? That's just preposterous.
I have no doubt that if college applications were stripped of all gender indicators, the percentage of women admitted would be just about that. It seems clear that the school's idea (in general) of their perfect student has been explicitly rejected by boys (assuming that K-12 has informed them correctly what that ideal is).
Sort of like the libertines of the '20 and hippies of the '60s.
Who's right in this disagreement? I don't know, but I do know that the students have been much more consistant over the past 40 years in this than the institutions. And *that* seems very odd.
I don't see it that boys have rejected schools' idea of the perfect student, but rather K-12 schools have rejected boys and endorsed girls as the perfect students.
And I had forgotten about extra credit. I recently saw a math grade for one girl of over 100% for a term, due to extra credit.
Finally, these are all averages. Yes, there are girls out there who are not into homework and try to get by on testing (and are thus also disadvantaged by giving more weight to such), and there are guys who do all their homework. But on average, I will submit that girls are more likely to get their homework in, and do it right, than boys are, and less likely to find themselves in the position of getting A's on tests, but B's or C's in the class due to their homework grades.
Bruce Hayden:
Your teachers were apparently way too nice to you.
I teach at a community college and I make homework a substantial part of the grade and here is why: it goes beyond the purely academic knowledge part of the course. It also focuses on keeping a schedule and doing what is required.
Most students plan to gain employment at some time. And when they do, they will be expected to keep a schedule and do what the boss asks them to, whether they 'already know' everything or not.
If you had me, and gotten A's on the tests but not handed in homework (which I count as 20% of the grade), you'd have gotten a 'C.'
It is the dirtiest little secret in higher education, primarily because it operates in favor of young white male applicants in the form of quotas. Without this practice, nearly all of the elite, historically male colleges would be more than 80 percent female.
Well, then, the colleges must not be teaching the hard sciences or engineering anymore.
I remember when a couple of friends of mine went to an orientation for new students in the engineering college of their university. There were about 120 students in the room, and there was a palable sexual charge in the air: the new class of engineering students had THREE female students! The guys couldn't believe their luck!
When the first speaker got up to talk and thanked everyone for attending the Engineering College, the three young women realized they were in the wrong room and left. The entire room deflated!
Coming out of the hard sciences myself, I find that 80% number to be laughable, and it makes me wonder what this Vaughn A. Carney's educational background is. Probably has a PhD in Education, LOL!
"dirty little secret"
I don't get the "dirty." Either you choose freshmen on data like grades and scores, and end up with mostly Asians and females, or you introduce social engineering criteria.
In a way, the fact that women are now seen as overrepresented is an indication that they've "made it" in the social engineering model.
It's nobody's right to go to Princeton, even if historically their ancestors were rejected unfairly. The one thing a name school can do is provide students with a network of alumni in high places. But if a kid has to choose between Berkeley undergrad or Cal State Whatever for a liberal arts BA, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
Ann, I think that debate goes back to Wollstonecraft and Rousseau.
I wonder how much of this all is the trend towards liberal arts colleges. It seems that a liberal arts education has become the 21st century equivalent of the high school degree. Many males used to drop out of high school because they didn't see it as necessary to be a factory worker or mechanic or house painter or whatever profession they aimed at.
Is that why there are less men trying hard to get into college (by doing well in high school), because they just don't see it as necessary step to do what they want to do?
Slocum, there is a penalty in my university for not holding up my end as an instructor. A tenured instructor was forced to retire last semester based on a series of three semesters' complaints about really extreme failures to keep up with grading, assignments and missing classes. That's an exceptional example. But every faculty member is assessed by students each semester, and in my department, specific questions on those student evaluations make up more than 50 percent of the criteria that determine whether instructors are retained (a sort of lesser version of tenure) and professors move up the tenure track.
I don't assign "busywork" because it doesn't advance the goals of the class. I ask students to write most of their assignments in class (it helps head off plagiarism); out-of-class work has practical applications. Quizzes are to make sure the reading gets done on time so classroom discussions are worthwhile. Most of our students work, and have a good work ethic in class as a result. They're already learning or have long developed time management skills. Though I'm not happy with all of the effects of the modern consumer mentality students have, it does encourage them to get their money's worth from their classroom experience.
"I teach at a community college and I make homework a substantial part of the grade and here is why: it goes beyond the purely academic knowledge part of the course. It also focuses on keeping a schedule and doing what is required.
Most students plan to gain employment at some time. And when they do, they will be expected to keep a schedule and do what the boss asks them to, whether they 'already know' everything or not."
This ridiculous comment is example 1A (sorry, Ann) of the adage 'Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach'. Has this person ever experienced work in the reality-based business world, where theory sounds nice, but practice is King? Good grief - knowing every little rule is more than worthless; it inhibits actual production. The truly successful have developed personal systems and strategies that work best for them, and don't follow a 'one size fits all' formula. They take basic guidelines and run with them, adding new wrinkles and discarding burdensome ones. As the phrase in 'Ghostbusters' goes, "I've WORKED in the private sector; they expect RESULTS". This teacher would be much more useful if he focused on results, and ditched his insistence on the process. It's not his job to worry about his students potential work success - his job is to teach the subject. The market will ultimately determine who succeeds and who doesn't, and his do-gooding basis of grading on useless factors that HE thinks are important will only hurt his students chances of landing a great opportunity by lowering the GPA of someone who's mastered the subject, but in a manner unacceptable to the teacher. What arrogance!
White men aproximately equal white women in colleges.
The shortage is in the men of color area.
Where are they?
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