College Entrance Exams: Are They Biased

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College Entrance Exams: Are They Biased?

According to “Fair Test”, the national center for fair and open testing, in an article entitled Gender Bias in College Admission Tests, “more than 1.3 million high school students annually take the educational testing service SAT I, America’s oldest and widely used college entrance exam.”

The article affirms that even though this exam is designed to predict students’ first year college grades, still female from High School all over the USA, receive lower scores than their male counterparts. Moreover, the aforementioned article says that “in 2001, females averaged 35 points lower than males on the Math section of the test, and 3 points lower on the Verbal section.”

The article goes on to say that this is not a faithful reflection of the academic preparation of both males and female students, but that the real cause might be in an existing bias at the time of preparation of the test. Even though I believe this could be true, it would be difficult to prove, although not impossible, if a study is done to assess the number of test makers and their gender, in relation to the number of those of female gender.

Something of the sort, the article says could be happening with another nationally well-known test for high schoolers to assess college entrance. They talk about the American College Testing Program Assessment (ACT). The test is divided in four sections: English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science Reasoning.

In a 1989 study, by Phyllis Rosser, entitled “The SAT Gender: Identifying the Causes”, found that females did better on questions about relationships, aesthetics and the humanities, while males did better on questions about sports, the physical sciences and business.

One is left to wonder what is the percentage of such questions on sports and the physical sciences and business, were it is well known males score better than women, given the natural make-up of their brain chemistry according to brain studies done in previous years which are in the public domain through magazines and TV and newspaper articles. We know that men are better at spatial and mathematical concepts, for they are so called “left brainers” generally, while women are more detail oriented in regards to beauty, relationships and especially relationships, where they shine with their own light. And because the tests are the Multiple-Choice type, we understand a bit that it is possible that being males more risk-takers than females, the test result would be inclined in favor of “guessing” rather than in academic preparation, or mental capacity.