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“Gender Bias in College Admissions Tests”, FairTest.org. (via vaginawoolf)
We were told our English Lang GCSEs were often about sport or politics because boys often underperformed in that exam. I can’t even fathom the number of things wrong with this kind of thinking.
(via benedictatorship)
i fail to see how math could be balanced to allow more improved scores for females. Maybe that’s not the point of the quote but it seems to me numbers are numbers, whether you’re male or female. Anyone care to enlighten me?
(via ghost-n-the-machine)
Particularly as a woman who did really well on the SAT (including the math section of the SAT-1 and—ironically—even better on the SAT-2, the higher-level math), and one who was also weighted down by other learning-type burdens, I was also kind of curious how math questions can be biased, so I went through and found the original source (which is here), and they offer some answers as to how the test format itself can be biased against women.
TL;DR run-down: time constraints that affect the way that different genders solve different problems (“speededness”), the guessing penalty (since boys are more likely than girls to take risks, even educated ones), and the actual format of the multiple-choice test (apparently girls do better on open-ended questions) all affect the performance of girls on the SAT, in a technical way that is related not to the topics being tested, but the structure of the test itself.
I think the last sentence of the quote, though, is the most interesting—’When females show the superior performance, “balancing” is required; when males show the superior performance, no adjustments are necessary.’ What’s frustrating (at least to me) is that the response is different:
Men underperform women on a portion of the exam -> Something must be wrong with that portion of the exam.
Women underperform men on a portion of the exam -> Women suck at math.
And for the sake of intersectionality—for years, there have been questions of racial and socioeconomic bias with regards to the SAT, as it uses language and subjects more familiar to white or wealthy students than to those of differing backgrounds. Notably, the College Board has maintained (in essence) that life isn’t fair, but in technical terms, the SAT is. (Yet, when this was the case for male testers falling behind female testers, the test was wrong—not society!)
(via saran-wrap)
I wasn’t doubting that the tests were biased, that’s not surprising at all. The world is generally biased towards making life easier for males, unfortunately, and that’s obvious. I was only asking how math could possibly be biased. I still don’t 100% understand. I understand male and female minds work differently in similar situations and that could affect how they approach a question, but when it comes down to multiplying or dividing a quantity by another quantity, I fail to see how that question could be made unbiased or even be biased at all. I understand how male/female psychology could affect how one analyzes a piece of writing or some such thing, but no matter your sex, 2*2 is 4. I’m not saying it’s not possible for math to be biased, just trying to understand how it could be. I think it’s safe to assume the author of the article knows more about the subject than me so I’m probably just not understanding. I’ll read it.
Edit: What I’ve gathered from the article is that the test incorrectly portrays males as being more intelligent than females because of the discrepancies in the scores being caused by sex-biased questions, but I will go as far as saying that the test itself is utter bullshit to begin with. You can’t give a single written test, or really any number of written tests, and conclude from that test’s results how intelligent someone is. The entire point of those tests is to quantify how much knowledge someone holds on only the subjects given, and nothing else. If the world in general was more intelligent these tests would be considered for what they are, irrelevant quantifications of how much someone knows about trivia at any given point. So I don’t think the biases are as big a problem as the fact that these tests are taken seriously, anyways. When it comes down to it the SAT and ACT are not accurate depictions of someone’s intelligence. Trying to quantify someone’s ability to learn and retain information will always end in folly.
(via ghost-n-the-machine)
So I don’t think the biases are as big a problem as the fact that these tests are taken seriously, anyways. When it comes down to it the SAT and ACT are not accurate depictions of someone’s intelligence. Trying to quantify someone’s ability to learn and retain information will always end in folly.
Yeah, I have always been inclined to agree with this. As glad as I am that I did get high scores on SAT stuff, because it undoubtedly helped me get into some pretty good colleges, the SAT (certainly the SAT-1) has been totally un-indicative of how my college experience operates. Very few professors (across disciplines!) give anything multiple choice, unless it’s a throwaway class anyway, and math is about, uh, doing math, and not clever standardized test tricks (fun fact: if you study for the SAT, you determine that there are actually a set number of very specific types of questions, with specifically time-effective methodologies for completing them). And since I’ve graduated high school, not once have I been asked to “do a reading” of a passage and answer specific multiple choice questions.
Unfortunately, I think it’s kind of like customary standards in the US—one of those things that are wildly impractical and a hindrance, but so entrenched that they keep causing trouble despite people’s best intentions to do differently (like accounting for different intelligence styles on a test, for example, or the fact that the test can be “gamed” by studying the test and not general knowledge.)
tl;dr I concur
(via hankeringheart)
![fucknojezebel:
You lost the war. Get over it. Flying the confederate flag is racist and backwards. You want to fly the confederate flag? Fine then. Just don’t get mad when I assume you fuck your sibling and hate books.
I am so glad I am not the only person who loves fucknojezebel!
My favorite on this topic, right below this one:
I’m going to go with “historically retarded [sic]”, and let me go on a quick rant fueled by things I remember from doing a Civil-War-themed academic competition.
Slavery was a “states’ rights” issue! One of the problems that started the American Civil War was the disagreement over whether the “right” to own people would be recognized across state lines (note: slavery was not legal in many Union states immediately prior to the Civil War, so yes, “people in the South owned slaves, probably more than the people in the North.” You know, probably.) Not to mention a bunch of other conflicts related to the slavery issue that I won’t enumerate because I’m tired.
“I personally believe that that fact had more to do with the fact that there are more farms in the South”—in a basic gemeinschaft (agricultural economy) vs. gesellschaft (industrial economy) kind of way, close. But there’s no logistical reason that a factory in Boston couldn’t involve itself in the slave trade and purchase workers the same way that a plantation in the South did. But Northern and Southern economies weren’t oppositional species; it’s important to remember, too, that Northern factories bought Southern raw materials (cotton). And you have to remember the changing culture of the Northeastern seaboard in the context of European immigration in that era.
The real link between slavery and states’ rights has to do with the establishment (or prohibition) of slavery in new states/territories. Inter-state conflict frequently had to do with the establishment of slavery or its prohibition somewhere. (Examples: “Bleeding Kansas,” several of the compromises that were fleshed out in the antebellum era.) The “states’ rights” thing had less to do with preserving slavery in the South than permitting its expansion in new states (because, of course, if slavery failed to expand, it would eventually suffocate and die out.) And it was, of course, a vile impugning of states’ rights to prohibit slavery in new U.S. acquisitions. Between this ongoing conflict and Lincoln’s eventual election, a lot of Southern states, to whom slavery was a fundamental part of the economy, the conflict inevitably escalated.
Okay, I’m done, because no one is going to read this anyway.
TL;DR: Only in a revisionist-history fantasy-land was the American Civil War “not really about” slavery.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m30k3zQiJs1qbiiefo1_500.png)
