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By Marcelle Richards

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The SAT I scores released Tuesday show that women are slipping in comparison to men at the state and national levels.

But the creeping gender gap may indicate there’s more to the equation than a lack of resources or rigorous courses to account for differences in scores.

Women in California trail men by 49 points at the state level and 42 points at the national level, which is up four points nationally from last year.

Because the performance of women cannot be tied solely to socio-economic status – which is criteria used by some to argue that the test is racially biased – both critics and proponents are examining the score discrepancies in attempts to explain them.

“It’s tough. The traditional things we think about for African-American and Latino students don’t really work here,” said public policy associate professor Meredith Phillips.

Kris Zavoli, the College Board’s director of secondary school services for the West, accounts for the gender gap by saying women take fewer hard science and math classes, such as AP calculus or physics in high school, since culturally they aren’t pushed as hard to do so as men. The College Board is the agency that administers the SAT and Advanced Placement tests.

Phillips, who specializes in educational policy and who studies the effects of the SAT, said the test doesn’t use material from these advanced classes and that the difference is more accurately attributed to the distribution of scores.

Men have higher averages because they tend to get perfect scores more often than women, she said.

Though the SAT I is designed to reflect students’ understanding of classroom material, University of California President Richard Atkinson took a stand against it in February when he urged the university to strike the SAT I from admissions criteria.

Until now, debate has largely focused on how the SAT I requirement affects minorities, who have a higher population in low-income cities, as those in low economic brackets often can’t afford test preparation.

This year, African-American students nationwide scored a cumulative 201 points less than whites, as compared to 198 last year; Latino students this year scored 151 points below whites, as opposed to last year’s 147.

“This proposal is about fairness in educational decision-making,” Atkinson said in a February statement. “Applicants for higher education should be assessed on the basis of their achievements in high school, in the context of the opportunities available to them.”

Atkinson, while a supporter of standardized tests, is against the SAT I because he says it measures an applicant’s test-taking skills rather than their knowledge.

Zavoli said the fervor the test stimulates over inequalities is a blessing in disguise.

Since attention is drawn to the differences in quality of schools and curriculum, the public and government will look to the SAT I as proof that students must be provided with these resources so they can pass the test, Zavoli said.

Zavoli said California’s ethnic composition accounts for its lagging place in the national line-up of verbal scores. With a score of 498, California was eight points below the national average on the verbal section. It was three points higher in math, with a score of 519.

“The fact that we have a much lower verbal score, 64 percent in the state have English as their first language, 81 percent nationally,” Zavoli said. “There’s some staggering diversity issues to deal with here. We’ve got a lot of bilingual kids or kids who didn’t learn English as their first language.”

The proposal to eliminate the SAT I in UC admissions requirements has been placed before the Academic Council, a systemwide advisory board that will be called to make a recommendation on the proposal to the UC Regents once the vote approaches.

UC media relations coordinator Abby Lunardini said she did not know whether the council would use the latest report from the College Board in making its decision.

“I don’t know if they’ll exactly use (the statistics) in their body of research or not, but the information is out there for them,” she said.

The Academic Council’s decision will have a “significant bearing on what the regents will do, but ultimately, it’s up to the regents to independently decide on the proposal,” Lunardini said.

The regents are expected to revisit the issue this fall to determine the fate of the controversial admissions tool.

With reports from Kelly Rayburn, Daily Bruin Senior Staff.