GENDER BIAS AND THE COLLEGE PREDICTIONS OF THE SATS: A Cry of Despair

This study reviews and extends the considerableliterature demonstrating that the various College Boardexaminations (most importantly the Scholastic AptitudeTests) make a small underprediction of women's college grades relative to those of men in allfields except engineering. This finding persists evenwhen corrections are made for differences in the fieldsthat women and men study and for sample selection bias. Because of this underprediction, womenmost probably are underrepresented relative to theirmerit in freshman classes and scholarship competitionsat selective public universities. The differences in predicted grades are small, but account foran underrepresentation of women by at least 5% of thefreshman classes of the University of California atBerkeley (200 to 300 a year) in the late 1980s. Various solutions to this underprediction by the SATsand the dilemmas they pose for public universities suchas Berkeley are explored.