Do girls perform in the VCE better than guys?

[Starlight]

Maybe girls are better at humanities that aren't scaled as generously as maths and science subjects that boys tend to do well in.

Ew humanities.

[Special At Specialist]

[Shenz0r]

Just comes down to the individual. You get what you put. Statistically it shows that females do better than males in VCE but those statistics could change any year. Like that one year where Melbourne High did better than MacRob(not that this is just based on the two schools). They just had a lot of hardworking students that year. Unless someone can find some research to prove females perform than males in VCE.

Not really, the only reason why the Class of 2009 beat Mac.Rob was because they all got derived-GAT scores on their mid-years due to swine flu...

*Even our principal admits it

[Truck]

The VCE is rigged to give girls a better chance than guys.

Firstly, guys are better at maths/science subjects whilst girls are better at English/humanities subjects, but the only compulsory subject is English which girls tend to do better at than guys. Also, there are only 3 maths and 4 science subjects to choose from (7 total), whilst there are 3 English and about 20 humanities subjects to choose from, giving girls a wider choice of subjects to choose from. If we made the only compulsory subject maths and brought in more maths/science subjects, then I can guarantee that guys would do a lot better and girls would do a lot worse.

Secondly, girls are better at multi-tasking whilst guys are better at doing one thing really well, but the VCE makes you choose a variety of subjects and do work based on all those subjects (eg. you can't have 3 maths in your primary 4 and you have to do 6 different subjects to get a good score). If we either reduced the amount of subjects that each person can take or allowed people to choose more of the same subject then guys would benefit more than girls.

Yeah ok.... it really just comes down to the individual.

[enwiabe]

The VCE is rigged to give girls a better chance than guys.

Firstly, guys are better at maths/science subjects whilst girls are better at English/humanities subjects, but the only compulsory subject is English which girls tend to do better at than guys. Also, there are only 3 maths and 4 science subjects to choose from (7 total), whilst there are 3 English and about 20 humanities subjects to choose from, giving girls a wider choice of subjects to choose from. If we made the only compulsory subject maths and brought in more maths/science subjects, then I can guarantee that guys would do a lot better and girls would do a lot worse.

Secondly, girls are better at multi-tasking whilst guys are better at doing one thing really well, but the VCE makes you choose a variety of subjects and do work based on all those subjects (eg. you can't have 3 maths in your primary 4 and you have to do 6 different subjects to get a good score). If we either reduced the amount of subjects that each person can take or allowed people to choose more of the same subject then guys would benefit more than girls.

Much of this is some pretty piss-poor generalisation. The differences between average male/female ATARs is a couple of points. All it reflects is that slightly more females mature at a younger age. In fact, the top ATAR of 99.95 is a huge statistical anomaly. Every year it's 2/3 male, 1/3 female. This is largely because the subjects which unlock an elite ATAR like 99.95 are the subjects for which females face a social stigma for excelling at: maths, physics, chemistry etc.

You give the game away, "Special at Specialist" when you offer your treatise on 1950s gender roles:

"Also, there are only 3 maths and 4 science subjects to choose from (7 total), whilst there are 3 English and about 20 humanities subjects to choose from, giving girls a wider choice of subjects to choose from. If we made the only compulsory subject maths and brought in more maths/science subjects, then I can guarantee that guys would do a lot better and girls would do a lot worse."

Excuse me? Boys should only strictly do maths/physics whereas girls should only do humanities and english? Thank you for that stunning insight, Captain Vanilla McRigid.

The only reason females do a lot worse in mathematics is sexist pigs like you undermining their confidence. You make them feel like shit for being female and doing maths, their confidence erodes and they just give it up. What a disgusting sentiment you just expressed, that somehow female genitalia corresponds to inferiority at Mathematics.. You think you're so shit hot at Mathematics? Take it from somebody who actually knows mathematics, your Y chromosome has nothing to do with it. Also, you're probably nowhere near as good as you think you are if your logical reasoning skills are so absurdly flawed as to think in that outmoded and frighteningly discriminatory way.

You should be ashamed of the sexist drivel you just wrote.

[pi]

Just comes down to the individual. You get what you put. Statistically it shows that females do better than males in VCE but those statistics could change any year. Like that one year where Melbourne High did better than MacRob(not that this is just based on the two schools). They just had a lot of hardworking students that year. Unless someone can find some research to prove females perform than males in VCE.

Not really, the only reason why the Class of 2009 beat Mac.Rob was because they all got derived-GAT scores on their mid-years due to swine flu...

*Even our principal admits it

Yeah, I know of someone who got an A mid-year for bio and got 48SS at the end of it all

[Special At Specialist]

Don't get so offended, enwiabe.
The question asked was "Do girls perform in the VCE better than guys?" Obviously there is going to be a bit of sexism and generalisations involved in the replies, unless you believe that girls and guys are exactly equal (which they obviously aren't).

And when I talk about 'equality', I don't mean equality as in rights. I am not a sexist person. I believe that women and men should all have the same rights. I'm talking about equality from a structural/psychological perspective. For example, men tend to have more grey matter but less white matter in their brains than women.

[Russ]

Don't get so offended, enwiabe.
The question asked was "Do girls perform in the VCE better than guys?" Obviously there is going to be a bit of sexism and generalisations involved in the replies, unless you believe that girls and guys are exactly equal (which they obviously aren't).

You can generalize and theorize based on reasonable assumptions, or you can apply stereotypes and ignore evidence.

[Special At Specialist]

You can generalize and theorize based on reasonable assumptions, or you can apply stereotypes and ignore evidence.

How's this for evidence?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050121100142.htm

"The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.

“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico. “In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain.”

Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage.

In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers.

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.

The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain’s frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively. The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain.

According to the researchers, this more centralized intelligence processing in women is consistent with clinical findings that frontal brain injuries can be more detrimental to cognitive performance in women than men. Studies such as these, Haier and Jung add, someday may help lead to earlier diagnoses of brain disorders in males and females, as well as more effective and precise treatment protocols to address damage to particular regions in the brain.

For this study, UCI and UNM combined their respective neuroimaging technology and subject pools to study brain morphology with magnetic resonance imaging. MRI scanning and cognitive testing involved subjects at UCI and UNM. Using a technique called voxel-based morphometry, Haier and his UCI colleagues converted these MRI pictures into structural brain “maps” that correlated brain tissue volume with IQ.

Dr. Michael T. Alkire and Kevin Head of UCI and Ronald A. Yeo of UNM participated in the study, which was supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

About the University of California, Irvine: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked public university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,400 faculty members. The second-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3 billion."

[Russ]

Just what do you think that proves?

[pi]

To say it's "rigged" is a bit far-fetched though. It's not like they did it on purpose (definition of "rigged").

That's like saying VCE is "rigged" for people with IQ's over 160 (it may be an advantage, but it was not specifically "rigged" in their favour).

[Special At Specialist]

Well obviously there are exceptions. There are always going to be women who are A+ maths students and men who fail maths, whilst men who are A+ humanities students and women who fail humanities.

I'm just saying that IN GENERAL, men tend to be better at maths/science but worse at english/humanities than women. That is not a sexist statement. It is NOT based on women feeling oppressed or discouraged from doing maths/science subjects. It is based on the structure and proportions of white/grey matter in the brain.

[enwiabe]

None of the research you linked supported your ridiculous assertion that males are genetically superior to females in math/sci and vice versa for humanities. At best, the article says the data "MAY HELP". May. And you're going to base your entire outlook on one study, with one tentative causal link.

I will not tolerate your furthering of a damaging social stigma that robs women of their confidence to undertake math/sci.

You are sexist, because you keep spouting that bullshit that "IN GENERAL, men tend to be better at maths/science but worse at english/humanities than women"

But you don't realise, and it makes you look quite painfully stupid, that the reason for the disparity of success in these fields is not genetically based. In fact, it's quite obvious that the REASON men get better results in maths/science than women is not because of genetics, but because of a cultural stigma that pervades society to this day, largely because of ignorant bigots like yourself. If you continue to further this line of argument I will ban you for sexism.

[Special At Specialist]

[enwiabe]

But that's where you're wrong.
You see, most people are not as psychologically fragile as you. They do not let something as petty as the grey matter in their brain prevent them from studying and enjoying a subject like maths/science. I don't know why you feel that women are so oppressed by the standards of men. Maybe you just met a girl who had a bad experience and now you're judging every girl who doesn't do maths based on that experience.

I'm not the one who's psychologically fragile. All children are psychologically fragile. Their brains are extremely malleable, and these stigmas affect them on a deep, sub-conscious level.

Yeah, I totally don't know why I'd feel like women are oppressed by men.

It's not like this is the first century where women have come close to equal rights in all human history, yeah? (And only in a few select parts of the developed world)

 It's not like there'd be any sort of residual after effects of tens of thousands of years of male dominance that are taking some time to eradicate? It's not like women only get paid 77c on the dollar of what men get paid. Educate yourself.

And no, I'm not judging the girls for it. I'm judging you. I'm judging people like you who influence girls at a young age to not do mathematics because you're a sexist pig.