ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 16, 1996 TAG: 9610160063
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: RACHEL L. JONES KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
A WRITING EXAM is being added next year to help girls capture their share of the college scholarship money.
Amy Dean missed qualifying as a National Merit Scholarship finalist by just two points when she took her Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test last year.
Dean, now a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Va., says her college plans won't suffer because of the near miss on the test, which more than a million high school juniors are taking this week.
But she and other talented high school girls may have lost chances at scholarships and other educational opportunities because the PSAT favors boys.
That may change next year, when more girls are expected to be winners, following an agreement between the federal Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and the College Board, which shapes the test.
The agreement will add a multiple-choice test on writing to the PSAT exam in a move designed to tip the scales toward girls, who comprised 39 percent of the 15,000 semifinalists for last year's scholarships.
Of the 1.2 million juniors taking the exam this week, only the 1.5 percent with the highest test scores will be eligible for $25 million in National Merit Awards.
The added writing exam is expected to help girls capture more of that scholarship money because they have historically done better on the verbal parts of the PSAT.
The agreement to reshape the exam is a significant victory for researchers who've claimed that rigorous academic tests like the PSAT and SAT create a ``stacked deck'' against female participants.
``The nature of these tests is to measure how well a person takes a test, and in these instances it's a `boy thing,''' said Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing in Cambridge, Mass., an independent organization that advocates testing reforms to remove cultural and other biases.
But a spokeswoman for the Educational Testing Service, which helps develop the PSAT for the College Board, said such criticism is ``shooting the messenger.''
``These tests unmask an inequality [in opportunity] for men and women that exists everywhere in the world,'' said Mercedes Morris-Garcia of ETS. ``We need to be dealing with that issue instead of criticizing a test that measures this inequality.''
FairTest, along with the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project, filed a gender-based complaint against the College Board in 1994. FairTest research found that even when girls' high school grades were higher than boys, their PSAT scores were consistently lower, Schaeffer said.
Tests like the PSAT are ``fast-paced multiple-choice games that put a premium on guessing,'' Schaffer said, a skill in which boys often excel.
In recent years, experts on gender in education have pointed to differences in how boys and girls are socialized by teachers and other adults to explain differences in learning patterns. High school tests like the PSAT can accentuate these differences, they say.
``These tests don't measure intelligence; they often measure who's more willing to take a risk, to gamble on getting the right answer,'' said Averil McClelland, director of the Kent State Project on the Study of Gender and Education. ``Girls don't get supported in these kinds of settings. They may hesitate or feel afraid of making the wrong choice more often than boys.''
When there's little more than a minute each for a series of difficult questions, every second can mean a point off your score, McClelland said. Also, questions that reflect experiences which girls don't normally have, such as building a cabinet or running down a football field, could put girls at a disadvantage.
LENGTH: Medium: 73 linesby CNB