Annually more than a million high school students take the Educational Testing Service's SAT, one of the most used college entrance exams (Fairtest 2009). This exam is one of the major factors that contribute to predicting a student’s first year college grades, more importantly whether or not a student even gets into college. A dominant issue that needs to be addressed is the complex sex bias encompassed by the nation-wide exam. Throughout both high school and college, females consistently earn higher grades than males, yet to the surprise of many they score lower on both the math and verbal portions on the SAT (Voyer, 1). This suggests the likeliness that there is a sex bias in the development of college entrance exams. Throughout a student's educational journey they face tests of all kinds, standardized tests in particular, they begin to think that there’s only one correct answer, that there’s only one correct answer in life. A test in general should strengthen a student's understanding of a subject, not limit their thinking or creativity. Applying one's knowledge on the SAT is the main purpose of the exam to begin with, however students take it as something meant to …show more content…
Since the test answers are in multiple-choice format, choices can be eliminated so that students can narrow down the correct answer. Research suggests that males tend to take more risks than females; resulting in males taking educated guesses while females choose an answer based on if they are sure it is correct (Sheehan 1). These educated guesses have a large impact on the scores of students resulting in males constantly scoring greater than females. If women continue to worry about the guessing penalty, this stress will negatively affect their score. The ETS should not give a penalty for guessing because females are more likely to leave many questions