In contrast to their generally similar levels of performance on standardized tests, American boys and girls perform very differently when measured by grades in their courses in school. Because performance in courses is less standardized, there is less consensus on gender differences in this measure of academic performance. Nonetheless, evidence indicates that girls have outperformed boys academically since the turn of the twentieth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century, girls enrolled in coeducational schools at roughly the same rate as boys, and for the most part, girls in those schools took the same classes with the same teachers as their male counterparts. Even then, girls earned higher grades than boys and were promoted to the next year level more readily. Writing in 1910, J. E. Armstrong reported that “the first three primary year levels of the schools of the whole United States show that a larger number of boys than girls have to repeat their year levels; the census shows that the sexes are born in very nearly equal numbers and yet the boys are four percent more numerous in the first grade.” It is also striking that as early as 1870, when rates of high school completion were extremely low (only two percent of seventeen-year-olds completed high school at the time), more girls than boys completed high school.
Regardless of their better performance in elementary school and higher rates of high school completion, young women were barred from attending college for much of the nineteenth century. They were first allowed to enroll in college in 1837, when Oberlin College began admitting women, arguably to provide ministers of religion with intelligent, cultivated, and thoroughly schooled wives. When the Civil War (1861-1865) led to a shortage of male students, more colleges became willing to enroll tuition-paying female students. By 1900, more than twice as many women were enrolled in coeducational institutions as were enrolled in women’s colleges. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the rapid rise in the number of women enrolling in coeducational institutions precipitated a new fear that women would take over colleges.
Fast-forward to the current era, and the female advantage in academic performance at all levels of education is indisputable. As early as kindergarten, girls demonstrate more advanced reading skills than boys, and boys continue to have problems with reading in elementary school. From kindergarten through high school and into college, girls get better grades than boys in all major subjects, including math and science. This leads us to ask if school-based policies can help improve the educational performance of boys. Boys face particular challenges stemming from the dual nature of masculine identity during adolescence. In schools with cultures that treat academic success as compatible with a respectable status within the adolescent culture, boys are more likely to perform on a par with girls. In other words, we expect the male shortfall to be relatively small in high-quality schools.
(Source: Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann, The Rise of Women)
(Question)
Choose the one way to complete each of these sentences that does NOT agree with the passage.
Compared with boys, girls
A earn higher grades and are more likely to advance to the next year level.
B get better grades in all subjects including math and science.
C have performed better in early primary school for at least a century.
D show more advanced reading ability until they finish kindergarten.
