5 ms·

Another reason GPA is problematic: it's sexist. Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% m

Another reason GPA is problematic: it's sexist. Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission. Male students tend to both score higher on average on the SATs and have a higher variance. Deemphasizing SATs in favor of GPA (which itself is a discriminatory measure-- teachers systemically show bias against boys when it comes to grades, particularly boys of color) is exacerbating the structural barriers boys face when it comes to attending university.

kbelder 4y ago
It might not be sexist; it might be that boys deserve lower GPAs because they tend to be worse at classwork. I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.
- sahila 4y ago
  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.
  - aeternum 4y ago
    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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - celtain 4y ago
    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.
    - lupire 4y ago
      The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.
      - krferriter 4y ago
        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.
        scarmig 4y ago
        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.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    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.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      (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".
  - giantg2 4y ago
    "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.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      > 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.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        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.
        scarmig 4y ago
        > 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/SEII-Discussion-Paper-2016.07-Terrier.pdf 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?
  - krferriter 4y ago
    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.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      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.
- scarmig 4y ago
  Classwork isn't some static thing; historically, boys had higher GPAs than women, and I suspect you can find some subfields of study today where boys consistently outperform women as far GPA goes. The choice of what subject matter goes into the curriculum that a GPA represents and how's it's taught and evaluated is a political choice. You could very easily make GPA equitable by removing one class that girls over perform in and replacing it with a class that boys over perform in.
  - lupire 4y ago
    The truly awkward question is that GPA is important because colleges give grades too, but maybe the classwork grading and tests are bad and not conducive not education overall.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      I'd be interested in seeing if there's a gender effect on how predictive SAT scores are on college completion rate. A quick survey indicates that this isn't an area education researchers have thought is a good use of their time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  It's also a maturity thing. Girls tend to be more mature than boys (emotionally and mentally) in their late teens, so their grades are a bit better. By the time everyone reaches their early 20's the differences have largely vanished.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  We regularly use outcomes as evidence of discrimination, so I think it’s reasonable to strive to be consistent. If we look at SAT discrepancies to identify groups harmed by structural issues in the test, we should also do the same with grades.
Auracle 4y ago
For what it's worth, I regularly interact with high school seniors and this topic has come up a few times. When I was in school, there was one teacher that was known to be sexist against boys. If you were regularly an A student, you'd be getting Cs. I was one of them. She taught English, which is probably the best subject to teach if you want to be subjective with your grades. Hell, there was another guy in class that kept getting the same percentage grade down to the second decimal point. 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.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  And yet people wonder why the MRA and MGTOW movements are gaining ground...
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission. 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.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls. 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.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    It's well known. Colleges will admit to it in public, often saying things like "we need to have a lower standard for boys, or else no girls will want to attend our school". (The ideas being that (1) the goal of running a college is to admit more girls; and (2) girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys.) 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.
    - Gareth321 4y ago
      I am yet to see a single university admit to biasing males in admission. Most of them admit to biasing by race, so it shouldn't be hard to find an example.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      If this is public, surely you have some actual sources to verify this? >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.
aeternum 4y ago
One solve for this is to require schools to anonymously publish their GPA percentiles along with some demographic info. 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.

kbelder 4y ago

It might not be sexist; it might be that boys deserve lower GPAs because they tend to be worse at classwork. I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.

sahila 4y ago
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.
- aeternum 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- celtain 4y ago
  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.
  - lupire 4y ago
    The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.
    - krferriter 4y ago
      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.
      - scarmig 4y ago
        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.
- npteljes 4y ago
  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.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    (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".
- giantg2 4y ago
  "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.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    > 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.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      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.
      - scarmig 4y ago
        > 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/SEII-Discussion-Paper-2016.07-Terrier.pdf 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?
- krferriter 4y ago
  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.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    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.
scarmig 4y ago
Classwork isn't some static thing; historically, boys had higher GPAs than women, and I suspect you can find some subfields of study today where boys consistently outperform women as far GPA goes. The choice of what subject matter goes into the curriculum that a GPA represents and how's it's taught and evaluated is a political choice. You could very easily make GPA equitable by removing one class that girls over perform in and replacing it with a class that boys over perform in.
- lupire 4y ago
  The truly awkward question is that GPA is important because colleges give grades too, but maybe the classwork grading and tests are bad and not conducive not education overall.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I'd be interested in seeing if there's a gender effect on how predictive SAT scores are on college completion rate. A quick survey indicates that this isn't an area education researchers have thought is a good use of their time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MengerSponge 4y ago
It's also a maturity thing. Girls tend to be more mature than boys (emotionally and mentally) in their late teens, so their grades are a bit better. By the time everyone reaches their early 20's the differences have largely vanished.
edmundsauto 4y ago
We regularly use outcomes as evidence of discrimination, so I think it’s reasonable to strive to be consistent. If we look at SAT discrepancies to identify groups harmed by structural issues in the test, we should also do the same with grades.

Auracle 4y ago

For what it's worth, I regularly interact with high school seniors and this topic has come up a few times. When I was in school, there was one teacher that was known to be sexist against boys. If you were regularly an A student, you'd be getting Cs. I was one of them. She taught English, which is probably the best subject to teach if you want to be subjective with your grades. Hell, there was another guy in class that kept getting the same percentage grade down to the second decimal point. 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.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
And yet people wonder why the MRA and MGTOW movements are gaining ground...

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission. 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.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls. 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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  It's well known. Colleges will admit to it in public, often saying things like "we need to have a lower standard for boys, or else no girls will want to attend our school". (The ideas being that (1) the goal of running a college is to admit more girls; and (2) girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys.) 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.
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    I am yet to see a single university admit to biasing males in admission. Most of them admit to biasing by race, so it shouldn't be hard to find an example.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    If this is public, surely you have some actual sources to verify this? >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.

aeternum 4y ago

One solve for this is to require schools to anonymously publish their GPA percentiles along with some demographic info. 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.