Studies show that girls get better grades in high school and college than boys—yet only about 35 percent of National Merit Scholarship winners are girls. The Executive Director of Fair Test contends that the “inequity is due solely to gender bias in the test used to select eligible students.” But the spokeswoman for the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, Elaine Detweiler, replies “We don’t really know why girls do worse on the exams. To blame the test for the difference between how boys and girls perform is like blaming a yardstick that boys are taller than girls.”
—“Merit Test Defended,” The Los Angeles Times , 26 May 1993