Starting May 2011, the College Board announced that they would no longer be deducting quarter points for wrong answers on Advanced Placement tests, meaning that it is now to the students’ best advantage to answer every question, even if it’s a blind guess.
This change supposedly will raise the score of female test takers, who statistically are less daring than male test takers and will bubble in empty spaces frantically when the best strategy would be to leave the spaces blank.
This brings to the forefront a long debated question: Are boys better than girls when it comes to higher level learning because they think differently and more daringly or is it not a matter of mindset at all?
A common argument that emphasizes intellectual equality is that there are simply fewer girls participating in or aiming for high level math and science branches. According to the National Science Foundation, which compared the math scores of 7 million high school students in ten states, girls and boys are equally skilled mathematically.
However, a closer look at statistics reveal that such an argument is not sound. Although a higher percentage of women are graduating from high school and undergraduate programs than men, in the highest levels of academia, men take the stage. For example, despite the fact that women earn approximately 48% of mathematics bachelor degrees each year, women consisted of only 22% of the applicant field for PhD’s in mathematics in 2009.
Clearly then, there is a disparity between men and women in the approach to higher level learning. In my years as a student, I have observed several distinct differences in learning method between boys and girls, which may be plausible explanations for the gender gap in higher level education:
- Boys invariably believe that they are naturally talented and that their successes are based on their smarts and their superior brainpower. Girls, on the other hand, when met with success, tend to think that the good results are the consequences of hard work and diligence, not necessarily due to talent. Likewise, when boys fail at a certain task, they maintain that they just aren’t trying and that they could do well at a moment’s notice if they wanted to; girls seem to think that they just aren’t good enough.
- Boys explore the subject domain more freely. When provided with a theorem, girls use it, boys prove it. When the teacher talks about one topic, boys explore another (or they don’t listen to the lecture and look it up themselves later, which would also contribute to a deeper understanding), girls listen quietly and jot down exactly what the teacher says. This discrepancy in learning method is exemplified in research conducted by the National Science Foundation in which girls were found to do better than boys on tests that closely matched classroom curriculum but not as well on large scope national tests such as the SAT.
- Boys are willing to take more chances. Boys are more willing to chance the B in the class to learn something new, try a different method, even if they turn out to be wrong. Girls are less likely to try something new, knowing that “the teacher’s way” will get them the grade they want.
Although these explanations are nowhere near set in stone, they are still useful, though general, abstractions that provide us some insight on why and how boys are still by far the majority in higher-level learning.