GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier around 4.5 (some with exceptions for valedictorians only).
I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.
A pull-up competition is a perfectly valid test if the job/program requires exactly that kind of upper body strength.
(2) There is a serious representation problem in primary education, particularly elementary schools. Both boys and girls benefit from having male teachers, boys particularly, since as it is they get the unambiguous message that school is an institution by and for women, one in which they don't have a place. It's bad enough that it shouldn't be thought of "we need to hire more men as elementary school teachers" but "we need to stop hiring women as elementary school teachers".
Please define sexist/sexism. This use doesn't match with my definition.
The measure is an objective one, which is highly correlated to graduation rate and thus pertianate. It's not like this is used to discriminate.
Yes, you could have individual teachers showing bias, but it seems that the data in the article doesn't support this being impactful. I'm actually a little skeptical that bias is rampant given how overbearing many of the school policies have become and an inability to explain grading differences would be highly suspect. I'd expect people to get sued/fired left and right over this if it's truly widespread.
The attribute of being labeled male is not a protected class (maybe legally, definitely de facto) in the same way that of being labeled female is.
To your broader point, disparate outcomes is ipso facto evidence of sexism. At least, that's what our society has settled on for other excluded identities, so we should do the same for men.
"disparate outcomes is ipso facto evidence of sexism."
Lol, no. Again, please provide your definition of sexism, as this does not match the one in the dictionary.
There are plenty of things that are not sexist and have disparate outcomes.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
This has been well studied and is a pervasive, consistent result. However, we don't see the EEOC launching lawsuits against or even studies investigating bias against boys. Can we really say that being male is a protected class if no one bothers to protect it?
I'll look more into this to see if I can dig out an American specific study.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2...
If we knew SATs are more predictive of college success for men than women, we'd even be able to simultaneously increase both representation of men in college and overall success rates. That's received a lot less study than other topics in vogue for educational researchers.
Colleges often re-weight both GPAs and test scores based on sex, race, socioeconomic background.
If we look at SAT discrepancies to identify groups harmed by structural issues in the test, we should also do the same with grades.
Anyways, I graduated from high school in 2006. At the same school now, there are apparently multiple/many teachers that are fully accepted by both the guys and girls as being sexist against boys. I doubt this trend is limited to my school and it's concerning as hell.
As far as college acceptance itself, the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls.
The structural issues are elsewhere, such as the emphasis on GPA and the related emphasis on grading for effort without caring whether the student knows the material.
Where are you getting this from? The data and all incentives going female>either>male would suggest otherwise, if it would suggest anything at all.
If you think the data suggest that colleges are overall giving admissions preferences to females in favor of males, you haven't looked at the data.
>girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys
This implies either unqualified boys are better attractors, or there not being enough qualified boys. I doubt either of those being true given tournament selection being omnipresent.
>you haven't looked at the data
The data most available shows admission rates to be fairly equal, with far more scholarships for girls in areas they lack presence than the other way around. The data on standards is practically invisible, and I'd be very skeptical of colleges publically admitting to sexism in today's age, let alone sexism in favor of boys. Openly doing so and not trying to change this is asking for a massive boycott.
> The data most available shows admission rates to be fairly equal, with far more scholarships for girls in areas they lack presence than the other way around. The data on standards is practically invisible
So you're saying... you haven't looked at the data, and that's why you're comfortable interpreting what it says.
Solid intellectual effort there.
> If this is public, surely you have some actual sources to verify this?
Indeed! You can find them yourself too, just look for any coverage of the issue over the last 20 years. I can't be responsible for everyone who wants to contradict stuff that's been known for decades. Get your own house in order.
Highly selective colleges that strive for parity must accomplish that by rejecting a few girls who would have gotten in on merit alone, and admitting a few boys who should have been the first ones out.
What incentives are you thinking of? What's the source of your data?
I don't know how they do it legally, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Their researchers apply for grants. That is considered "funding". Enrolling students who have taken out student loans is also considered to be "goverment funding" for the school rather than the student.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1681
> in regard to admissions to educational institutions, this section shall apply only to institutions of vocational education, professional education, and graduate higher education, and to public institutions of undergraduate higher education
Bayesian analysis could then be applied to pull the signal out of the GPA data. GPAs can then be renormalized such that students are not incentivized to go to a HS that gives everyone As.
I personally prefer the GPA system as it measures your performance over your final 2 years of high school rather than having your future determined by one test.
In the US now we have federal school testing to try and normalize schools better. But before that many schools were graduate students that were illiterate (actually some still are, but I hope it's gotten better..). The US is 10x the population of Canada so image the difficulty for a liberal arts school in the northeast looking at a student from some rural 500-person school they've never heard of from the southwest.
Canada's population is smaller but we also have many obscure rural schools. Non-prestigious universities don't have much data but they also don't have much choice in top applicants so it doesn't really matter. Over time, they can build up decently accurate profiles of high schools for majority of applicants.
It also puts you at a disadvantage if you come from an immigrant area or poor area where your 90% will not count as highly as someone with 60% from the richest areas with a trackwork of success.
It really punishes anyone not rich and locks them out of elite universities and pushes most of the poor out of average universities.
A single test where everyone can study and pass seems more fair than basing it on things that can be impossible to change like where you grew up
Neither system is perfect but I think the purely SAT approach creates too much unnecessary stress for high school students when there are other proxies for determining future success.
Grades can be easily biased
There is nothing stopping you from taking the SATs multiple times. It's encouraged because you most likely will go up a few points the 2nd pass. I've taken it twice myself, 3 times if you include the PSAT. And I also took the ACT, only once.
GPAs you can only screw up once. If you fail even one class it's impossible to climb back to the top.
All three of these things are already happening.
For example, the Cal State University system has purely objective admissions for most campuses. That's good! But while they technically consider SAT scores, the last time I looked the difference in admissions points between a minimum SAT score and a maximum SAT score was roughly equal to the difference between a 2.0 GPA and a 3.0.
I think it is even worse -- the inflation is not universal. At Cornell (undergrad), most engineering classes set the mean to B- or C+. You had to go 1SD higher to get to A- and near 2SD to get A+. Imagine how shocked I was to hear my friends at Princeton had a mean set to A-. Consider the pressure this puts on some students and not others, esp when you're all applying to the same graduate programs. Is a Cornell B+ worth more than a Princeton A-? Statistically yes, but in reality no one is harmonizing the distributions.
There is also the issue of fancy private prep schools which have 10 or 15 "Valedictorians" which many of us public school students were shocked to learn when we arrived at college. You'd meet multiple people claiming to be valedictorian from the same school's graduating class until you learn that private prep schools stretch the meaning of valedictorian.
Some reason life lessons: pay enough and you get to bend the rules.
Some reason life lessons: more elite, less pressure.
I think the correct thing is to require schools to publish their minimum and maximum grades, and then everyone can just scale that range as appropriate - because why should some kid going to Stanford get to report a 4.0 GPA when they’ve got low grades, but a kid at CSUEB has to report something lower because they’re a state school that can’t invent new grades?
From my personal experience, my GPA when I graduated was 8.7 or something, which at least makes it clear that I’m not on the same scale as you might normally think - whereas a 3.9 from Stanford might seem really good but is bolstered by courses with >4 scores. An extreme would be if you heard someone from my school talk about a 3.9GPA, which if IIRC would imply an average grade in the region of 60% (and yes you could in principle go negative, but that would get you on the “let’s talk about whether uni is right for you” list with the uni admin)
My university's GPA was (IIRC) -2..9 or something where 9=A+, 8=A, 7=A-, etc but that wasn't used in any externally facing mechanism, because a GPA as a single score is not useful outside of the school administration. Single average GPAs aren't remotely robust enough to warrant any kind of external value, and they actively discourage any course experimentation because if you are wanting to do anything GPA gated you cannot risk anything that you don't already know you'll get a high grade in.
Given you could get into uni on a high enough 6th form cert grade this is obviously absurd (I think that it was something like your total score for your best 4 subjects had to be less than 6, so you can see how one course consuming 3 points even if you were absolutely perfect screws that)
FYI, they rate according to the school's scale. This knowledge is shared.
You don't think they'd notice if every single candidate from specific schools never got higher than a 4.0? :)