That is the only rational interpretation of this idea:
A professor of information sciences at the University of Akron tried to institute a policy of jacking up womens grades a level or two because in each of his class of 30, there are only 1 or 2 women… and they’re not doing well. The university has quashed the notion for now, but the professor claimed in an email that this is a “national movement to encourage female students to go [in]to information sciences.”
Just another front in the left-wing war on science. Of course any such “incentive” affirmative action grading program such as this will primarily and immediately hurt the women it purports to try to help. Those who really can’t hack it but get passed through anyway will find the post-college world to be harsh and unimpressed; they’ll likely find their careers to be short or very rough. And then there are the women who legitimately *do* do well. Let’s say a woman *legitimately* earns an “A.” Well, you can’t raise her grade two levels above “A,” so she still gets an “A.” But any potential employer who does due diligence will find that her school inflates fem-grades, so they’ll assume she’s actually a “C” student.
I’m a tad fuzzy on what exactly the goal of the courses this professor teaches are, but it seems he teaches programming for business purposes. So, presumably *not* designing bridges or airplanes or performing brain surgery, but still far more important than art of gender studies. So his students are doing something of *some* actual value to society, where if they turn out to be incompetent there will be important and negative consequences (where a gender studies graduate who turns out to be wholly incompetent in his/her field will be largely unrecognizable from a standout student).
I took programing courses back in the day, and I friggen’ hated ’em. Coding just ain’t my schtick. And while it might have been nice to have inflated *my* grades in those courses, if I’d been told that I could have had inflated grades if I decided to major in programming… I still would have avoided that major like the plague. “We’ll help you take courses you hate so you can get a job you won’t like and won’t do well in!” Gee, sign me up. So I don’t see how this idea can possibly work for anything other than keeping less-competent students in the course.
The fact that there are 28 dudes for every two chicks in an IT course surprises me nine whatsoever. My recollection of aerospace engineering courses a quarter century ago had a slightly better ratio of something like 25 to 5 or so. This was not due to the wimmins not being allowed in or being actively deterred, but because for whatever reason women didn’t *want*to take the courses needed for an Aero E degree. And whenever I think of an IT degree I have difficulty maintaining consciousness never mind an interest in an IT degree. So I am not surprised that more women don’t want to take those courses.
