The study examines uses grades given out as a proxie for achievement. Receive an A, you've understood the course and are anxious to continue in science. Receive an A-, you're diminished and will never be a scientist.

So the study finds that female instructors and some male instructors give more A's to women students. The reason must be that the women students are doing better.

Of course, the women students could in actuality be doing exactly as well, but the instructors give them more A's. Some instructors are like that.

I wonder if there's an impression that some instructors inflate women's grades. Or that some instructors give lower grades to women for the same work. We are, after all, in the realm of subjective evaluations here.

We know very little more after this study than we did before it. And because the male/female dichotomy in science is receiving so much attention, making it a social issue rather than a scientific issue, people are going to be sensitized in a situation - the classroom - which shouldn't involve that kind of additional pressure.

The act of measuring the "problem" may be worsening the "problem".

There is a strong social pressure to professors and teachers to give women a lenient grade. Professors/teachers in many schools/universities are being evaluated on how they evaluate female students, in other words, how many A's they give to women students, as opposed to men, as a way to measure teacher/professor's commitment to gender equality. If the teacher/professor was not giving out A's to female students at least in equall proportion to male students, then "he" must be a closet chauvinist.

Under such sociatel presure from PC forces and feminists, you can imaine that there will be more female students with conflated grades in science, taught by female techer/professors who have been affirmative-actioned into their posts despite under-qualified and lacking sufficient scientific knowledge. These female students will be hired at higher rate by companies, who are equally under intense pressure to hire "more women" in science field.

I don't think the future of American science is bright.

While this could easily be a problem with history or English exams, science and mathematics exams are generally graded on purely objective terms. If you don't know much about the Franco-Prussian War, you can still easily fake your way through an essay. If you don't know much about differential equations, your numbers will be wrong and you'll fail.

You've faked your way through an essay about the Franco-Prussian War, then? At a military school? You might be accused of excessive modesty.

At any rate, from the article, here's the difference we're discussing:

The authors found that women on average obtain scores that are 0.15 grade points lower (half the difference between an A and an A-) than their male classmates, even after accounting for students' SAT scores. The gap in performance was widest for women taught by men. When a female instructor was put at the front of the classroom, nearly two-thirds of the grade point gender gap evaporated.

[End quote]

Are you certain teacher discretion couldn't bridge such a small difference?

Still, a pretty face brightens up a room.

A program intended to equalize opportunity brings performance into question. Not the first field subject to that problem, and not the first set of fully accomplished people to resent the suspicion of being underachieving beneficiaries.

Granted it's been several years since I taught undergrads when I was a grad student but I don't recall any pressure to grade female and male students differently. I wasn't in a hard science but I did teach several Geography classes on subjects like GIS, spatial analysis, and projections and had predominately objective grading systems in addition to more subjective papers and projects.

My classes were generally 60/40 male to female and in general male students did better with more objective (multiple choice) tests and female students were better at projects and write ups. However, female students were generally able to express themselves better, in terms of participating in classes and writing, coming to office hours when they were confused, etc. than male students.

In general, this balanced each other out and the bell curve wasn't noticably different between male and female students.

Sorenlerby: I have taught in a business school at a large state university in the U.S. for 11 years now. I have never heard of any professor getting pressured for an equal grade distribution between male and female students. I suspect pressure could happen if there was a clear case of bias, but this issue does not appear to be on the radar screen at my institution.

Mostly true Xando,

And yet from my college experience, I know it is not completely true.

The professor can either ding you for leaving out a step or skip it because s/he thinks what you did write down makes that step extraneous.

Not sure I agree about easy/hard graders related to sex tho.

My calcIII teacher was female and the entire first row (honors students) dropped after the first test.

Meanwhile the two male teachers (who were "hard") didn't have this.

She gave a difficult test, with 25% of it on a chapter she had not lectured on. And then said, "There will be no curve". Since it was a math class, we all did the math, and it was clear that making an A was now impossible.

My hardest teacher turned out to be easiest after figuring out a simple question to ask him.

It was over grammars and natural languages and he wanted to teach us but what he thought were good examples were still over our head. Finally, one day, I asked him for a "trivial" example. He gave us one- and it was obvious to 80% of us what the heck he was talking about. From then on, he would give a trivial example and the class understood him. Our class had a much higher gpa than any of his previous classes. He enjoyed the class a lot too. He liked teaching and finally he had a way to teach that he had been missing.

While this could easily be a problem with history or English exams, science and mathematics exams are generally graded on purely objective terms.

Just a guess, but you probably didn't major in engineering or physics.

Many engineering profs love making exams devilishly difficult. I've been in courses where I was actually thrilled to get a 40% because I killed the class average. In those types of exams, there's a fair amount of subjectivity. Most people don't get the correct answer, so how much partial credit do you give?

I've also had a few professors that were absolutely in love with short answer questions and research papers; both of which can be at least as subjective as your Franco-Prussian war example.

If you don't know much about differential equations, your numbers will be wrong and you'll fail.

I'm currently a grad student in aerospace engineering... oh, how I long for the days when my answer was a number!

@ sorenlerby:

I should probably ignore this, since your past track record of posts suggests that you are a misogynistic troll...

But I dare you to come up with one shred of objective evidence to support your biases.

I also invite you to proofread your badly written posts.

mmdmmd:

@ sorenlerby:

I should probably ignore this, since your past track record of posts suggests that you are a misogynistic troll...

But I dare you to come up with one shred of objective evidence to support your biases.

I also invite you to proofread your badly written posts.

As long as we are proofreading, I believe that you meant to say, "I also invite you to proofread your poorly written posts."