FairTest’s claim that PSAT questions show gender bias unfounded
Are women naturally stupid?
The National Center for Fair
and Open Testing (also known as FairTest) believes so, and last week it
forced one of the most prestigious scholarship programs to go along with
its view of female intellectual inferiority.
FairTest was angry at the
College Board, the organization responsible for the Preliminary Scholastic
Aptitude Test - a test given to almost 2 million high school students
every year. The scores on the test are used as the basis for awarding
the prestigious National Merit Scholarship.
Back in 1994 FairTest complained
the test discriminated against women. According to the group, although
more women take the test, men are disproportionately represented in the
ranks of finalists for the scholarships.
Girls are being screened
out at the semifinalist level,” claimed Pamela Zappardino, executive
director of the group.
After two years of harassing
the College Board and having the Department of Education breathing down
the agency’s neck, FairTest got College Board to agree to alter its test.
So what were the horrible
sexist methods the College Board was using that discriminated against
women? The test contained too many multiple choice questions.
That’s right - it’s FairTest’s
position that multiple choice questions are inherently biased against
women, whereas essay questions are free of gender bias. The woman asked
to pick from a list of choices the significance of the Magna Carta apparently
freezes due to some genetic brain defect, but if asked to write a few
sentences about it, all of a sudden the defect is alleviated and she can
proceed normally.
This may sound a bit odd for
those unfamiliar with the current crop of fundamentalist feminists, but
it’s right in line with the shift by mainstream feminism away from the
principle of equality before the law regardless of sex to the slippery,
dangerous notion of fairness.
Equality is a rather simple
legal principle - every member of society gets treated alike regardless
of sex. It shouldn’t matter whether the new cop being hired is a woman
or a man. The important thing is to hire the best law enforcement officer
available.
Fairness is the notion that
when equality leads to a result some group doesn’t particularly like,
the government should intervene to set things right.
Fairness and equality are
principles inherently at odds with one another - feminists make a wrong
choice in rejecting equality to embrace the temporary comfort of fairness.
It can be scary realizing it is your performance, not your sex or race
or other factor which will determine how you are rewarded. It’s also an
ideal feminists used to embrace before political expediency became more
important than principle.
It does more than merely demean
women - it leads to pointless allegations. Despite its claims, for example,
FairTest has little substantive evidence that more men were semifinalists
for the National Merit Scholarship than women. In fact, according to the
College Board, while a small gap between the sexes on the PSAT did exist
several years ago, it all but vanished in the 1990s.
So how did FairTest reach
its conclusion? It had a list of the names of some National Merit Scholarship
semifinalists which did not identify the sex of the winner. It then basically
guessed at which winners had “female” names and which had “male”
names. So in FairTest’s world, Morgan Freeman is a man and so is Morgan
Fairchild. Darryl Strawberry’s a man and so is Darryl Hannah (perhaps
explaining why her relationship with John Kennedy Jr. was doomed). Lynn
Redgrave is a woman and so is Lynn Swan.
The problem here becomes evident.
In a world where feminizing traditionally male names and vice versa has
become increasingly prevalent, such a methodology is hilariously inept.
The moral of the story is
that not all women are inherently stupid - reserve that label for the
inept researchers at FairTest.
The FairTest’s claim that PSAT questions show gender bias unfounded by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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