Gender bias and the college predictions of the SATs: A cry of despair

This study reviews and extends the considerable literature demonstrating th at the various College Board examinations (most importantly the Scholastic Aptitude Tests) make a small underprediction of women's college grades rela tive to those of men in all fields except engineering. This finding persist s even when corrections are made for differences in the fields that women a nd men study and for sample selection bias. Because of this underprediction , women most probably are underrepresented relative to their merit in fresh man classes and scholarship competitions at selective public universities. The differences in predicted grades are small, but account for an underrepr esentation of women by at least 5% of the freshman classes of the Universit y of California at Berkeley (200 to 300 a year) in the late 1980s. Various solutions to this underprediction by the SATs and the dilemmas they pose fo r public universities Such as Berkeley are explored.