Originally Posted by mithawk
I cannot remember where I heard/read this, but my recollection is that boys have a slightly lower mean but a higher standard deviation. Therefore boys dominate at the very high end, but girls dominate at a lower level (but still considerably above average).

On the SAT boys have a slightly higher overall composite score than girls (higher in verbal and math, lower in writing) and slightly higher standard deviations in scores http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/TotalGroup-2012.pdf. In 2012 there were 74,000 males and 45,000 females with math SAT scores of 700 or above. About 60% of students with A or A+ high school GPAs are female (Table 13).