Boys and GCSEs

[Juells]

I found the link and tone of this article interesting. I thought from the skim-reading that boys had overtaken girls and were now getting the best results. 'tougher exams favour boys'.

uk.news.yahoo.com/gcse-results-day-2018-tougher-083000749.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews

It's such a tragedy when girls do better than boys at anything :(

But who is defining "tougher" or "more difficult"? Is it more difficult to work consistently over a long period? Or to cram at least he last minute?

Anyone'd think the boys came out on top, despite Girls remain in the lead, with 23.4 per cent achieving one of the highest grades, which is the same as last year, compared to 17.1 per cent of boys, up from 16.2 per cent last year.

It's just weird.

Well the AQA English language paper seemed very designed to appeal to boys in a sort of obvious gender stereotyping way. They read two pieces about surfing (male protagonists of course) and then with no resources had to write a newspaper article about corruption in sport.

I realise many girls enjoy sport but it felt like "we have to get boys writing marks up...I know let's do sport".

Btw it was a disaster for my sport hating son...

The article makes it clear that girls are still doing better, but that the gender gap is narrowing, surely that's a good thing? Why would you not want boys to start doing better?

Why would you not want boys to start doing better?

I'm not saying boys shouldn't be doing better - they should be doing just as well as the girls. But the fact is that they're not, but the link and article are couched in such a way that it seems boys are doing better than girls, hurray.

Talking about boys’ ability, aren’t we always told that boys’ intelligence is more spread out and girls are more bunched together so you get more boy geniuses than girls?

If that’s true, how come 5% of girls’ GCSE entries got a grade 9, and only 3.6% of boys’?

When girls have overall performed better than boys in previous years the headlines have always been along the lines of 'why aren't the boys doing better than the girls? The exams are unfair to boys!' almost as if the natural order of things is for boys to to better...

But i didn't find the article misleading at all? It's quite clear that boys are improving but girls still in the lead. Should we keep quiet about the fact that boys are at last starting to improve their GCSE results?