Standardized Tests Are a New Glass Ceiling
Women do better in class and worse on tests—and there are consequences.
(by Annie Zhang)
Hardly a week goes by without a panel, conference, or
symposium on luring women into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers. Even the president has joined in: “We’ve got half the population that is way underrepresented in those fields.” He has his numbers right. Women currently receive less than a fifth of all bachelor’s degrees in physics, computer science, and engineering. In the last national count, only 8,851 women had majored in mathematics and statistics.We’ve heard most of the reasons, not least hostility in laboratories. But a more central cause became apparent as I began researching the teaching and testing of mathematics. Standardized testing in math, where women do significantly worse than men, is setting women back before they even begin college. Since mathematics is the first hurdle for STEM fields, women are unlikely to sign on if they’ve already been told that they don’t measure up. We know that the problem is the test. It’s not the students, because girls and women are getting better grades than boys and men in high-school and college mathematics courses. Without changing our methods for measuring ability, we stand little chance of changing the gender imbalance among our scientists and engineers.
The importance we assign to standardized tests is eclipsing that of assessments by sentient teachers. Each year, more weight is given to scores disgorged by the ACT and the SAT, backstopped by the GRE, MCAT, and LSAT, not to mention standardized Common Core tests, which are given over to firms like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Computer-awarded scores are touted as objective, whereas grades bestowed by teachers are seen as subjective, if not tainted by biases. (An ACT study intimated that the principal victims of prejudice were Standardized Tests Are a New Glass Ceiling | The Nation: