Via John Rosenberg at Discriminations, this bit of statistical information about women, men and SAT scores.
Our friends at Census say that in the 15-19 age group, men make up 51.4% of the total population. But they only represent 46.5% of SAT 1 test takers. I'll be the first to admit that there are lots of things could explain that away....
But the score distributions show that among the test takers in the higest score range (750-800), males made up 50.5% of that group on the verbal reasoning portion of the test and 68.7% of that group on the math reasoning portion of the test. In fact, males are disproportionately represented in the score ranges on the math section for all score ranges above 600. Looking at the most extreme tail of the distribution, the coveted 800, males were 49.3% of the population achieving that score on the verbal portion, and 72% of the population achieving that score on the math portion. So, even in the verbal reasoning portion, men are represented in a higher percentage than they are in the overall test population. Without question, though, they are dominant in the math portion.
Someone better get the smelling salts for MIT professor Nancy Hopkins!
Peg, it's a good thing you aren't the President of an Ivy League school. You'd be run out of town...
Posted by: Dean aka LD | Friday, April 01, 2005 at 03:04 PM