Exam results and statistics

Statistics worry me when it comes to exam results. Somehow, they take away the individual acheivement. On A level results day someone tweeted a link "everything you need to know about this year's A level results." I clicked on it and saw stats that compared subjects, schools and gender but it didn't tell me how incredibly hard my son had worked or how disappointed he was with a mark on one of the papers. 

Today, the GCSE results came out and the director of Teach First posted this tweet.

I was confused.

Why does it matter that when you group the GCSE population by gender, girls do slightly better than boys?

I asked and he seems to think it's a huge problem and that something needs to be done about it. He might be right 

but again, I find I'm worried by statistics.

I'm always worried about any statistics that divide the population by their sexual organs. Men and women are the same species and the spread of good exam results crosses the sexual divide. If all girls got the top grades and all boys the bottom grades I would agree that there is a problem. I asked if he would be so concerned if the statistics were grouped by eye colour. I mean if they analysed the results again and discovered that blue eyed children did 10% better than brown eyed children would that be a concern? I also suggested that in this year's group the girls might have been 8% smarter than the boys.  He asked me if I thought that girls were genetically smarter than boys, which was a bit tricksy. Of course that is not what I was saying, quite the opposite, in fact. I think there is no genetic difference between boys and girls intelligence and that we need to stop pitting one gender against the other as if life is some huge male/female war. 

 Was he suggesting that blue eyed children will be 10% better because of genetics? If so, that is dangerously close to the idea of an Ayrian super race but that's a different argument. We could group children by a preference for red or green or whether they like tomatoes or if they have a tree in their back garden and one group will statistically outperform the other group because that's what happens. Not one person would suggest seperate schools for tomato eaters, as they have done to solve this 'boys underperforming' problem.

I understand the rhetoric. I've been around long enough to have heard the theory that schools are letting boys down and I agree there are boys who would learn better in an outdoor environment or benefit from starting school a year later or be removed from the temptations of the female form to a single sex establishment, where they could just bully each other to be better.

I wonder if the outrage would be as huge if the difference was the other way round?

And does it matter anyway? Girls do better in school: men get all the top jobs. Maybe girls work harder to get better exam results because they have to. If exams were weighted in favour of boys I suspect the girls would just work even harder because their opportunities are more limited without the top grades.

There is so much division of men and women in society and this happens from birth. Schooling isn't going to change much if we refuse to believe that both sexes are equal and keep using statistics to compare them.