Gender Bias in College Admissions Tests
The SAT I
Approximately 1.3 million high school students annually take the Educational Testing Service's SAT I, America's oldest and most widely used college entrance exam. It is composed of two sections, Verbal and Math, each scored on a 200-800 point scale. Test questions are almost exclusively multiple-choice; a few "student-produced response" questions require the student to "grid in" the answer.
The SAT I is designed solely to predict students' first year college grades. Yet, despite the fact that females earn higher grades throughout both high school and college, they consistently receive lower scores on the exam than do their male counterparts. In 2001, females averaged 35 points lower than males on the Math section of the test, and 3 points lower on the Verbal section.
A gender gap favoring males persists across all other demographic characteristics, including family income, parental education, grade point average, course work, rank in class, size of high school, size of city, etc.
Contrary to the test-maker's assertions, the gender gap does not merely reflect differences in academic preparation. ETS researchers Howard Wainer and Linda Steinberg found that on average, males score 33 points higher on the SAT-Math than females who earn the same grades in the same college math courses. The authors state that the "consistent under prediction of women's performance in college mathematics courses provides evidence that the SAT-M, used alone, is mismeasuring the profile of proficiencies that contribute to success in college."
American College Testing Program Assessment (ACT)
An alternative college entrance exam to the SAT is the American College Testing Program's ACT Assessment. This test is taken by approximately one million students each year, predominantly in the Midwest, Southwest and South. The ACT is composed entirely of multiple-choice questions and is divided into four sections: English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science Reasoning. The test is scored on a scale that ranges from 1 to 36.
Females also score lower than males on the ACT, although in recent years the gender gap has narrowed significantly. In 2001, women's ACT composite scores averaged .2 points lower than men's.
Although the ACT gender gap is smaller than that of the SAT, it is likely that this test also under predicts the abilities of young women. For example, despite the fact that identical percentages of male and female ACT-takers take Algebra II and Chemistry, females' scores on the Mathematics and Science Reasoning sections of the test are significantly lower than males'.
Graduate School Exams
Like the SAT and ACT, graduate school admissions exams also reflect score gaps between males and females. On the 1999-2000 Graduate Record Exam (GRE), the most widely used graduate school exam, females scored lower than males on all three sections of the test (each with a range of 200 to 800 points) - 9 points lower on the Verbal portion, 97 points lower on the Quantitative section, and 25 points lower on the Analytic section.
The exam widely used in medical school admissions, the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), also shows a persistent edge for male test-takers in 2000 - males outscored females by .1 points on Verbal Reasoning, 1.0 points on Physical Sciences, and .7 points on Biological Sciences, on a 1-15 point scale. Both groups received comparable scores on the Writing Sample.
The Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), used by most business schools in the United States, also disadvantages females. The average scores for 1999-2000 test-takers showed women 34 points below their male peers on the 200-800 point scale.
The gender gaps on graduate school admissions exams take a particularly heavy toll on educational equity given the strict score cut-offs many programs employ. More so than undergraduate admissions, where high school grades and test scores are generally (though not always) considered in conjunction with one another, graduate schools more often set score minimums that adversely effect the admission of females and students of color.
Reprinted with the permission of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
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