Originally Posted by ultramarina
Oh yes, of course, individual brain development is very plastic. But that is not the same thing as saying that within 20 years, the female brain has been able to evolve so drastically such that while very high-scoring boys once outnumbered girls 20 to 1 on math tests, they now outnumber them only 3 to 1.

(Or maybe you were agreeing with me--sorry!)

Hmm.

On the AMC test, for grade 8, the girls are almost the same in number as the boys and the average point difference is just 0.7. At the upper ends of the test, there are more boys than girls, so I imagine that a distribution of the results would show that the majority of the girls actually score better than a majority of the boys if the upper end of both sexes was removed from the sample.