Curricular choice and the differential prediction of the tertiary-academicperformance of men and women

American research findings suggest that the tertiary-academic performance o f men and women is predicted differentially in the sense that for the same high-school and aptitude-test performance, the actual grades achieved by wo men are higher than those predicted for them. and that for men, the situati on is reversed. In the present study, three hierarchical regressions were p erformed to predict the extent of differential prediction for 329 men and 4 70 women who registered as first-year students at the University of the Ora nge Free State in 1992. With the two scales of the GSAT, matriculation symb ol point total (MSPT), and a combination of these two predictors, gender (i ntercept) differences accounted for 4.55%, 2.36% and 2.18% of variance in a ccumulated mean curriculum percentage marks (MCPMs) over a three-year perio d. Next, hierarchical multiple regressions, in which the categorical variab le of curricular choice was specified to enter the equation ahead of gender , were performed to predict the deviations of students' predicted MCPMs fro m their actual MCPMs las indices of differential prediction). When cur-ricu lar choice was controlled through this semi-partial correlational approach, the percentage of these indices' variance that was explained by gender was reduced by between 53% and 78%. In the process the percentage of variance explained by gender was virtually wiped out: When the index of differential prediction was based on MSPT and a combination of the GSAT and MSPT, gende r explained less than one per cent of the variance of these indices.