+91 8041202438
Do girls outperform boys in exams?
- Apoorva Upadhyay
Editorial Team
Haven’t we heard this often times enough? ‘Once again, the girls do better than boys at the final exams’, ‘girls shine through at the board results’, so on and so forth. Have you ever wondered at the truth behind it? Are the statements really worth anything? Or is it something that has had a stereotype created and is constantly repeated over and over again?
There is no easy route when it comes to success. Only hard work and determination can yield good results. Unfortunately, some people struggle to perform well in the examination environment, even if they have the knowledge to get through. When the outcome of many years of hard work is determined in one single session, stress can play a huge part and too much can literally cause the mind to go blank.
There’s been a long standing debate among boys and girls, to determine who performs better under exam stress and there may finally be an answer. Girls get better grades.Studies conducted by University of Georgia tutor, Chris Cornwall, conclude that the main reason lies within their better attitude towards learning. What is surprising is that this holds true at all ages, in all subjects including math and science and around the world, the American Psychological Association analysis found.
Girls succeed over boys in school because they are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They have attentiveness, persistence, organisation, flexibility and eagerness to learn. The authors speculated that social and cultural factors could also be among several possible explanations. Maybe parents assume boys are better at Math and Science, so they encourage girls to put more effort into their studies, which could lead to the slight advantage girls have in all courses, they wrote. ‘Gender differences in learning styles’, is another possibility. Previous research showed that girls tend to study in order to understand the material, whereas boys emphasize performance, which indicates a focus on the final grades. “Mastery of the subject matter generally produces better marks than performance emphasis, so this could account in part for males’ lower marks than females,” the authors wrote.
These very findings are also reflected in a recent study, by psychology professors Daniel and Susan Voyer, at the University of New Brunswick. Their results were based on a meta-analysis of 369 studies involving the academic grades of over one million boys and girls. These students belonged to 30 different nations. The findings were unquestionably straightforward and stated that girls do earn higher grades in every subject, including the science-related fields, where boys are generally thought to have the upper edge.
Although some may argue, that the current marking schemes are skewed towards the girls, the truth of the matter seems to be this, whether due to cultural or parental pressure, the changing norms of the society, with women becoming more and more independent by the day, or the fact that girls, inherently are more detail oriented, thus making them more thorough scholars, all the evidence seems to support and point towards one thing, girls do have the edge when it comes to academics.
