SAT Strategy by Gender: Men Guess, Women Leave it Blank

(Digital Vision)

To guess or not to guess?  Most students wrestle with this question at least once during their multiple choice test-taking years. A new paper by Harvard economics grad student Katherine Baldiga examines whether men and women approach the issue differently. From the abstract:

In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men. The experimental test consists of practice questions from the World History and U.S. History SAT II subject tests; we vary the size of the penalty imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in these test-takers, and differences in risk preferences fail to explain all of the observed gap. Because the gender gap exists only when the task is framed as an SAT, we argue that differences in competitive attitudes may drive the gender differences we observe. Finally, we show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our experimental test, putting women and more risk averse test-takers at a disadvantage.”

Baldiga’s results might help explain why women often do better in college than their SAT scores would have predicted and raise an important question: Are multiple-choice test scores the best way to fairly “measure aptitude and forecast future achievement”?  Readers, what do you think?  Are SAT tests gender-biased?  Of course, whether or not such gender differences are innate or cultural is a whole other research question.

(HT: Market Design)