That’s the fascinating question that Professor Mark Perry tries to answer at his blog, Carpe Diem, by looking at the results from the SAT tests.

Have a look at the post here, for there’s no point in my reiterating his entire argument.

Thre’s no real (ie, statistically significant) difference between grade point averages in maths. There’s no difference in years spent studying maths. And yet, when we come to the SAT there is indeed a difference in the results achieved by boys and girls. As the Professor says:

Based on the statistical evidence, is there any other conclusion than this obvious one: In general and on average, male high school students in the U.S. are just plain better at math than female high school students? If there are other reasonable conclusions, please share them.

Well, actually, yes I think there are other reasonable conclusions. At least, ones which are reasonable to reach.

This is actually something of a long standing bug bear of mine: they way in which exam situations benefit boys over girls and the way in which continuous assessment benefits girls over boys.

I don’t think it’s all that outrageous a suggestion to point out that, on average, girls are more likely to do their homework, more likely to study, more likely to hand in an assignment than boys are. Similarly, it’s not too difficult to see that boys do better than girls in a stressed or time limited environment. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here I think.

Allow me a slight diversion: thirty to forty years ago (when I was still being educated) there was much talk of how awful it was that there was a gender gap in educational achievement.  But it was boys doing better than girls at that time. The problem was identified as being that the English educational system at the time relied almost exclusively upon exam grades. There were no GPAs, no assessments and no class grades. Every two or three years the system forced you into an exam where you were tested upon what you had learned in those previous years. The entirety of a two year program on, say, history, would be judged on how well you performed in two, three hour, essay based exams.

That system was changed: now there is coursework, continuous assessment, grades and GPAs just as in the US system and: well, the most startling result is that we now have still a gender gap, but it is girls doing better than boys.

So my reading of the Professors results is just that, well, boys do better in exam conditions than girls do.