Smart boys, bad grades?

Your son's report card has arrived. Open it. A, A, A, F, A, A-, D. Sound familiar?

Smart boys are falling behind in school, and some say it's because of an anti-boy bias in the current grading system.

"We went through a huge bank of tests ... to determine why my son, as a genius, is getting grades that are C's and D's, why his grades go A, A, A, F, F, A, A, A," said Chuck Wilkinson, whose son, Gage, is a sophomore at Alta High School. "There's nothing in between, and it's very frustrating to me."

Chuck Wilkinson said it is upsetting to know his son is smart enough but is not getting the grades to get into college. "He gets an F in science last year and scores second in the whole system in the science overall testing," he said.

This is an issue that affects millions and millions of boys, said William Draves, co-author of "Smart Boys, Bad Grades," who was a speaker at the Building Boys Success Conference at Utah Valley State College.

"The grading system has become gender-biased and is skewed," he said. "There are millions of smart boys who are testing at a very high level and getting really low grades."

In the book, Draves and co-author Julie Coates highlight the consequences of the grading bias, which they say causes one-third of boys to get worse grades than girls and, as a result, fewer boys are getting into and graduating from college.

Female undergraduates have become the majority in higher education, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. In 1970, 42 percent of undergraduates were female; in 2000, their numbers had swelled to 56 percent.

An article Coates and Draves published through the Learning Resources Network says that boys are getting bad grades in school because they don't do as well on homework as girls and are graded on behavior that is unrelated to what they have learned.

The authors say that's because boys tend to learn differently than girls and, among other things related to behavior instead of intellect, they often turn in their homework late. Eighty-four percent of teachers report boys turn in homework late, they say.

"The way to find out how your boy is actually doing is not to look at the grade but to look at his test scores," Draves said. "If you want to know academically what he knows and if he's learning something, you look at test scores rather than grades because test scores are gender-neutral."