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Comment by sahila | Hacker News Reader

If it's as you say systemic that boys do worse at classwork, then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist. It would be akin to having a pull-up competition determining admissions knowing full well boys perform better than girls.

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But classwork is what you'll have to do in college anyway. It's not the admissions criteria that's the problem, it's the format of undergraduate higher education itself.

A pull-up competition is a perfectly valid test if the job/program requires exactly that kind of upper body strength.

The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.

The opposite is true in my experience. I basically coasted through high school spending very little time on homework. I'd often spend hours, or even tens of hours, on single college assignments.

Far more courses in college rely on one or two exams over coursework. To be more precise, men tend to do better on tests of mastery of material over evidences of participation.

I view it similarly to military, or construction. It's not the biases' fault, as many as there are, that men are overrepresented in these domains. I'd urge to address systemic issues, but the profile of representation is not necessarily a symptom of such an issue.

(1) Many colleges are already practicing affirmative action for boys because many boys are not applying. Schools are glad to have girls but girls don't want to go to a school which is 70% girls so they try to admit more boys to make the social life more normal.

(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".

"then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist."

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.

> 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.

Literally, legally, Title IX protects males as well as females. Any pattern of arbitrary grading against male students and not female students would provide a basis.

"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.

> Any pattern of arbitrary grading against male students and not female students would provide a basis.

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?

That study is from France and doesn't mention the pervasive nature (in fact it shows some areas/groups don't have problems). Do you have one from the US? I'm particularly interested in one that has data to back up your "pervasive" claim.

American educational researchers are surprisingly uninterested in this topic; I managed to find recent studies on it out of France, Italy (from last week!)[0], the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and the Czech Republic, but none out of the US. In fact, I found more material in the US about the gendered bias in grading by students of teachers than by teachers of students(!!!).

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...

They're trying to determine how well you will do in courses in college. Surely how well you did in courses in high school is relevant. It is not sexist just because some groups tend to do better than others at a certain point in time. Girls have increased their academic success because they've historically not been encouraged to do so, but in recent decades they have. Girls in high school today are like 2nd (or 3rd) generation of women in the US to have been actually broadly encouraged to do well in school and obtain professional careers. There is an issue with boys feeling hopeless about their futures, and maybe this is a factor in why they as an aggregate have done worse in school relative to girls in recent years, but the solution isn't to lower standards.

SATs are predictive of college completion rates. Deemphasizing them in favor of another predictive metric (that women tend to do better on) exacerbates the disparate graduation rates that are adversely affecting men.

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.

Is it then more or less sexist if colleges aim to balance gender ratios (as most do)?

Colleges often re-weight both GPAs and test scores based on sex, race, socioeconomic background.

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