Boys can be smart too!

Here's the story

Traditionally girls filled the role of clean-cut, organised scholarly worker, excelling in NCEA where boys don't, being diligent and prepared where boys relied on on-the-spot knowledge. But in scholarship exams boys narrow the gap only marginally, proving either their maturity developing later than girls or that NCEA wasn't made with equality in mind.

"And the head of a successful all- boys college says single-sex education better serves boys because their self-belief is not dented by seeing girls win more awards."

That man is speaking the pure and somewhat sexist truth. Boys do perform better at single sex schools. And not just because they feel defeated by the more inferior gender being their superior at academics, they're distracted by girls and avoid looking like a 'geek' or a 'suck-up' in front of them. Boys from single sex schools are more likely to choose the more traditionally 'feminine' subjects such as foreign languages, domestic classes (cooking & sewing), arts, and social sciences without the risk of insecurity of being labelled 'soft' by their girlier peers. Same goes for girls from single sex schools and 'masculine' subjects such as hard sciences, maths, computing, engineering and constructions, graphics, and technology subjects.

"Girls consistently outperform boys at all three levels of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, but latest Scholarship figures show the top male pupils are fighting back.
Boys won 1505 Scholarships last year – just 24 fewer than girls – and three boys-only schools feature in the top 10 colleges for scholarship results."

The difference between NCEA and scholarships mainly is that Scholarship exams actually offer monentary scholarships. This is an incentive to work hard and get to the reward before others do which creates a ground of competition, which boys strive in (testosterone pumping in their bloodstreams, a subtle bead of sweat sweeping across the expression of intense concentration raising wrinkles on the premature brow)

"Scholarship exams, as opposed to the growing internally assessed component of NCEA, suited boys' competitive streak, he said.
"I think also there's an element of boys maturing later. Girls tend to be better organisers. I think boys respond more often to short, sharp challenges."
"Boys are competitive in spirit. They enjoy exams rather than the standards-based model [of NCEA]."
Boys responded better in an all- boys environment that encouraged them to aim for the top and believe in themselves. "In a co-educational environment they constantly see girls or young women going up to receive awards. It is actually a put- down to them in their thinking. That's excluded in an all-male environment," he said."


So the conclusion is that boys can be insanely smart, but only if they try? But watch out near the end of 6th form... Come 7th form those gangly awkward boys with a knack for programming calculators will become power-mad grade stealers. Not to fret though, at a co-ed school many tantalising distractions lurk in every dark mildew infested corner *evil look*


-From the girl who can never find time to study