Yep. That’s exactly it. Here in the US they de-emphasized exams in the mid-late 80s. College admissions were previously 2/3rds exams and 1/3rd grades, and then it was reversed in one fell swoop.
The proportion of girls admitted surpassed boys almost overnight.
The female preponderance in higher ed admissions was entirely engineered.
But it’s OK, because now credentials have been significantly devalued, and professors barely make middle-class pay (serves them right).
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"professors barely make middle-class pay (serves them right)"
Yes, because teaching the new intellectual elite should not have upper class compensation. Only the worst students should become professors so that the remainder can serve as job creators that (barely) trickle down their upper class pay.
In all industrialized countries, girls outperform boys in standardised tests. In most of them, the college enrollment ratio is higher for females than males. In the USA, females did first outnumber males in the late 1980s, mostly because male college enrollment is slightly more subject to the job market, and male college enrollment FELL in 1985-1988 amid good economic conditions (you can see the same, even more markedly, happening in Japan in the same years). It fell again in the late 1990s, for the same reasons.
I don't understand: don't you do exams to then get grades depending on how well you perform on the exams? As a Swede, I'm not familiar with the US College admission system...
You're wrong, it was the earlier male preponderance that was entirely engineered. Once everyone is included on the same conditions, women outperform men in education in most part of the world.
@Swede
Yeah i'm not sure I understand it either, in the UK we just have exams and coursework. Seems like in the states ALL of your work gets graded.
Not sure how I feel about that. It would have been next to impossible for me to maintain my educational focus for several years straight.
Oh noes! Wimmins is gettin' smarts!
Kind of sucks for you and your fellow Spearhead idiots if women are intelligent, huh? You know, 'cuz you'll never, ever get a date.
That’s exactly it. Here in the US they de-emphasized exams in the mid-late 80s. College admissions were previously 2/3rds exams and 1/3rd grades, and then it was reversed in one fell swoop.
Not sure if this is true but don't we WANT more emphasis on people that do their assignments on time and well? Given that in most jobs you can easily look up information that you need you'd think that an exam isn't the most realistic test of how people would do in the work force.
So if you change the variables that the admission depend upon, the results change? Ehm, yeah. If that suprises you you might wanna get your head checked.
So women do better than you now? Cry me a fucking river.
>>Professors barely make middle-class pay (serves them right).<<
No, it doesn't serve them right.
But what do you mean by "middle-class pay"? And what field do you refer to?
As a scientist, I can expect something a bit over 100,000 USD/year if I land a faculty job, depending on the place. That would put me at about the 80th percentile of the US income distribution.
Professors in other fields range widely in salary, from maybe 70kUSD/year for adjunct teaching faculty to 500kUSD/year for senior faculty who need to be well-paid to stop them from going off and defecting to industry.
The really underpaid educators in the US are high school and elementary teachers.
Regarding Swede's question:
He's talking about the difference between standardized tests and school grades. Most high school juniors/seniors take the SAT (which used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude/Assessment Test, but now is an empty acronym), which is supposed to be a rough measure of how well one is prepared for college. There's another test, the ACT, which serves a similar purpose and is used more by colleges in the midwest/south. Whichever the college uses (some will only accept one of the tests, though I believe most now will accept either), it's not the only thing they use in the admission process.
SAT scores and school grades don't always align. It's possible to be at a school that doesn't teach well but hands out high grades to their students, and in theory those kids might not do well on the SAT since they didn't actually learn the things they needed to. On the flip side, you could have a student who slacks off most of the year at school, getting poor grades, but studies hard for and does well on the SAT, and thus would look like a better overall student than s/he actually is if only the standardized score were used. The latter option isn't terribly uncommon, because there are numerous services for preparing students for the SAT. Knowing how to take it and knowing what sorts of questions come up frequently can boost one's scores a significant amount. And it's not unheard of for people to cheat on it or pay someone else to take it for them.
And yet, The Shrub got into Yale.
What does that say about you, W.F.?
What's really tragic here is, not only do college professors barely make middle-class pay, high school and middle school teachers make even less.
And they wonder why the quality of American education has declined since the Space Race ended....
So much wrong crammed into 5 sentences.
I would suspect you're angry because a girl bumped you from your pit scratching class, but I can't believe you actually thought you had a shot at even that level of college.
The proportion of girls admitted surpassed boys almost overnight.
How would de-emphasizing tests vs. grades suddenly make a huge difference in the admission ratio of boys to girls? Last year on the SATs, boys outperformed girls on average by a paltry 22 points - about 1 1/2%. It's hard to believe that's a significant deciding factor in admissions.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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