By Professor Doom
The whole “women
can do anything just as well as men” paradigm that’s driven our society of late
has always puzzled me. Yes, absolutely, women should be allowed the same
opportunities as men, I’ve certainly no problem with that, but there’s always
been a strange hypocrisy to it that I’ve found troubling.
Women joining the
military, for example, is fine on the surface…but then the whole noble purpose
is destroyed when the physical training requirements are reduced for women.
This is rationalized away with “women won’t have the same combat duties, so
don’t need to have the same level of physical skills,” but I find this very
weak in light of the assertion of equality. Similarly women firefighters have
reduced requirements…this is all well and good, but firefighters are supposed
to be able to save people, including each other. When the walls are burning and
your co-worker is unconscious, being able to physically carry him seems far
more important than political correctness, but such musings are above my pay
grade, I suppose.
Stumbling back
over to higher education, there’s been a relentless push to cram women, as many
as possible, into STEM majors. Again, as long as they’re playing by the same
rules as the males I see no issue in principle with this. But I see a devious
new plan to change the rules for women:
Now, I’m not a
jerk, of course I want women to succeed, but this kind of standard-lowering is
insidious. I remember when I was at a bogus community college, and every year,
in a desperate bid to get more people passing the tests, specifically above 50%
of the class, we made the tests easier and easier.
The result? More
and more people were getting perfect scores, so that something like 20% of the
class were scoring 100% perfect on the simple tests…but we still had 60% of the
class fail because of, well, many reasons I’ve discussed before.
Similarly, extending the test time is only
going to accomplish so much. Honest, for the vast majority of math problems,
having more time doesn’t help. I grant the extension here was only an extra 15
minutes (up to 105 minutes from the ‘fast’ 90 minutes), but there’s principle
here.
Please understand how
this hides the issue. The students who could finish the test in 90 minutes are
getting no benefit from the extra time. It’s only, possibly, benefitting the
women who are every bit as good, just slow, or so the people extending the test
time claim. Why the cognitive disconnect in the previous sentence isn’t
completely obvious is beyond me. At least I’m not alone:
However, critics have
slammed the changes as 'sexist' as they believe it suggests that women are the
weaker sex.
“Suggests,” seriously? To assert
that this lowering of standards merely suggests
women are inferior is insulting to me (and, I would presume, any scholar), much
as extending the test time is insulting to women as well. “Our females are
slow, so we’ll change the rules just for them. Equality!” seems to be the party
line here, but it makes my head hurt just considering it.
While I’m well
past my youth, there are some physical competitions I can engage in. However,
they’d be in the “senior” category, or otherwise age-restricted. I’m ok with
this, as I know that I’m no match for a 20 year-old in physical things.
But if I won an
age-restricted competition, it’d be an insult to my intelligence to assume I’m
anything but the best in a very restricted category. By the same measure, the
women taking these tests should complain bitterly about such insulting
treatment…or just acknowledge that they’re inferior, much as I’d consider my physical
skills. The males taking the test should also complain, as it’s cheapening
their Oxford education.
And something else
gets revealed here. Perhaps the thing I hate most about every proposed change
to education is it always works. I’m
serious, I’ve never heard of a single study showing that a change to some
method of teaching or grading doesn’t improve student scores.
This may seem
shocking, but the gentle reader should understand why this is the case. See,
the people who study the changes are always the ones who proposed the
changes…they have a huge conflict of interest in making sure their ideas work.
So, always, they do what it takes to represent the data as showing that they
have good ideas.
Forgive me, then,
if I’m unimpressed with Oxford’s claim:
'However, third-year female students did
show an improvement on their second-year marks.
I’m glad the
female students did better, good for them but…this statistic is being given in
a vacuum. I mean, did the males do better? If they didn’t, then we’ve got a
method that’s actively hurting males. Shouldn’t we be worried about hurting
males?
If the males also
did better (and I suspect they would), what happens if they improved more than
the females? Now we’re back to hurting the females again.
What happens if
both genders improved equally? Then we’ve accomplished nothing by extending the
time. All three of these possibilities are possible based on the
vacuum-statistic provided, and all three undermine the study.
Please understand
the people running this study, proposing this new idea, are supposed to know at
least a little about research methods. That’s what a Ph.D. generally
represents, after all, the ability to conduct scholarly research. But instead
of legitimate discussion, we get this one statistic that tells us basically
nothing about how well the new idea works…although it does lead one ignorant of
how often this research is muddled to believe it’s a good idea. As the target
audience for this proposed change is administration at other campuses, counting
on ignorance is perfectly reasonable, I admit.
The comments are
generally laughing at the foolishness here, and I tend to concur. Most likely,
if they ever do legitimately study this topic, they’ll find that extending the
test time improves scores up to a point, but past a certain point (say, the 90
minutes that had been established by long tradition), usefulness of extending
the test time drops off sharply.
But they’ll still
give women more time.
Because they’re
equal.
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