Re: Justification for the SAT

[kber <kber@EARTHLINK.NET>]

I don't know how you did your analysis to determine that dropping SAT was unfair
to boys, but I wonder if you have used all the proper controls.  I will address
that first, and then also raise a couple of other issues.

A quick look at the list of schools provided by FairTest shows several that are
female only, such as Mount Holyoke and Mississippi University for women.  I did
not  in a quick perusal recognize any male only schools on that list.  Did you
adjust your analysis for this?  Also, there are a fair number of art and music
types of schools on the list.    I   would not be surprised to find that several
or more of these had a disproportionate number of female students.  Now there
could be several reasons for such an imbalance:  many of such school never
required SATs, not even when I was in high school back in the 1960's.  If they
maintained a preponderance of females, it would not be because the had dropped
the requirement for SATs, quite logically.  For any school that might have more
females than males, is the acceptance rate roughly proportional to the
application rate?  Is the enrollment rate proportional to the acceptance rate?
There are LOTS of issues that you have not addressed in your post that may well
explain much of the differential you have "identified."

But this sounds a little like some of the screeds against ANY kind of
affirmative action.  In the past, white males have assumed they were entitled to
superior place or position.  Often this was because of alumni set-asides, or
similar kinds of programs.  Many scholarships had such restrictions that
minorities and women were not eligible, and in some schools less qualified
students who were white males were admitted because there were designated
scholarship for them.  But if those restrictions were removed or if equivalent
limited scholarships were offered for minorities and/or women, white men (of
which I am one) would start to scream "reverse discrimination."

So let's look at another piece of information from the FairTest web site.  Until
a recent settlement to modify the PSAT to count the writing section, something
around 40% of the national merit scholarships went to females.  In the more
recent tests, that figure went up to 45%.  The inclusions of the writing section
as counting reduced the still extant bias in favor of MALES on that test.  Would
you also have us believe that this therefore is a discrimination against boys?

Had you done a more thorough study than what you have described, might not you
have found that even with the bias against boys you claim you have found in
these schools, that is more than offset by the imbalance in their favor in all
the other schools?  Thus you complain about a relatively small proportion that
has done nothing more than a partial address of the bias in boys' favor that is
otherwise so wide-spread.  And all this presumes that the reason for the
difference in enrollment is discrimination against boys, which as I think I have
shown up front, is not necessarily the case.


Ken Bernstein

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