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This is an article from Australia. Apparently, to balance the male/female ratio in engineering, the university of technology in Sydney decided to lower the required ATAR for women to enter their engineering course.

Thoughts?

[smh.com.au]

kasmian 7 Sep 25
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This is good. Like many other types of work, men and women work well together. Engineering is in many ways an art, just like all building activities. Women have different thoughts. These are always contributions to every endeavor.

When "The standards" do not reflect the advancement of culture, they must be updated. This is not a statement in support of social justice. It is an understanding that every aspect of human life requires many perspectives. And women's perspectives have rarely been properly measured. Especially when it comes to the design of nearly everything women, and most men, use.

And: as elsewhere, more people will meet reasonable significant others in the workplace. This is also good.

@kasmian And yes: "lowering scores" will result in more men qualifying, so no joy.

"special treatment" is in context with the current decades-old "standards" that have not reflected the needs of all perspectives.

I agree. The evaluation process should change.

0

With the lowered requirements for female candidates, male candidates would ideally prefer other universities that hold their peer candidates to same standards unless the university in question happens to be one of the best Australia has to offer. There's something even weirder in my country where a specific number of admissions can only be filled by female applicants, reserved in a sense. In case of lack of female applicants, those admissions would go waste thus reducing the total intake of admissions for the year. If a university compromises on admission criteria, you're practically giving a future employer a reason to differentiate between employees on basis of gender in terms of pay and everything else due to the comparative lenient standards held by the university. Using this as a pilot study where a comparative study of male and female students grades could yield more insights, as to whether female students perform as well as their male counterparts despite the easing.

0

It would seem that high school instruction in math and science may leave something to be desired, or that social norms in the region steer women away from interest and competence in math and science.

0

Okay. Not from Australia, but I have considered this for years in a different way. State colleges in the U.S. are required to meet certain minority standards.

I really didn't care until I came across it. It isn't fair to others, but that didn't bother me. Life sometimes isn't fair. I often saw minorities receiving, for free, additional tutoring. Didn't bother me.

What bothered me, and still does, was this. It devalued everyone's degree by putting into the working world graduated students who lack the natural ability to grasp more complex topics in the same manner as the other students.

0

there have been many tests (IQ tests spring to mind, as well as many college entrance exams) that have been shown to be written and administered in a way that (probably unwiittingly) favors certain groups. It wouldnt surprise me if this test has the same problem.

Does lowering the testing limit reflect an admission that the test itself isnt really worth that much, and the pool of candidates with lower test scores, would actually include a pool of people who might make better engineers? Maybe the test was set up to cull "undesirables" from engineering school, instead of culling those who would not make as good of engineers?

no shade to those with excellent test scores, but thats not exactly the only skill set youll need in real life.

1

not as bad as lowering the standards for women passing the physical tests for police, firefighters.
but still shouldn't happen. the best candidates should be accepted, period.
i sometimes wish that one of those bleeding heart lib assholes was stuck on the 4th floor of a building that was on fire & had to depend on a 130 lb woman on a ladder to save him. never happen of course b/c they wouldn't send a woman up on a ladder to rescue him to begin with.
all they do with these lower standards is discriminate against better qualified candidates. period.

1

Universities need to get back to educating and out of the business of social engineering.

BD66 Level 8 Sep 25, 2019
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Encouraging women to persue engineering degrees is a positive thing. Lowering the bar for expected performance because they are female? NO!! Lowering the bar for anyone is not acceptable!! Either you can perform or not, that's the issue and that's the way it should stay for everyone!

0

Since I don't Pay Taxes to Australia I have No Thoughts about what they are doing Down Under.

@OwlInASack I am Up Here... Not Down Under.... Let me Mind My Biz Up Here while Ignoring Somebody Else's Biz Down Under. And if to you that is Weird... So Fuck You then... Weird This. I am back to be concerned with the Pleasant Itch on my Balls.

@OwlInASack I am going on Vacation and House Hunting tomorrow back to my Island... Just me and my bodyguard... What you got to Counter Offer to that? Hurry the Fuck Up... less than 16 hours remaining... Hurry... Mr Helper... Hurry or Shut the Fuck Up. Your Call.

0

I say absolutely NOT.
Either lower the required scores for BOTH male and female applicants, or
leave them as is, and require ALL applicants to achieve the scores.
They should NEVER lower the scores to enable more females to enter the
program.
That's bullshit.

@creative51 Okay, fine. Like I said, lower the requirements for everyone, not just females.

0

from the guardian, a better known source, and i excerpt here at the top one part of the below that may make a difference:

UTS Women in Engineering and IT director Arti Agarwal insisted the move would not lower standards.

“We’re not taking in underperforming students or doing tokenism here,” she told Guardian Australia. “Nobody is getting a free pass … They all have to do all the degree requirements [and] internships.”

okay here is the actual article in its entirety:

University lowers entry score for female applicants in male-dominated courses
University of Technology Sydney makes 10-point adjustment in hope to address gender imbalance in engineering, computing and construction

Lisa Martin

@LMARTI
Thu 29 Aug 2019 02.55 EDTFirst published on Thu 29 Aug 2019 02.34 EDT
The University of Technology Sydney has received approval to make the adjustment to the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (Atar) of female students in some degrees
The University of Technology Sydney has received approval to make the adjustment to the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (Atar) of female students in some degrees Photograph: Justin Ouellette/Getty Images
The University of Technology Sydney is trying to encourage more young women to study engineering, computing and construction degrees by adjusting year 12 entry scores for female applicants.

The university has received approval from the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board to make a 10-point adjustment to the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank of female students applying for those degrees for the 2020 academic year.

The university hopes it will help address gender imbalances in those male-dominated industries.

UTS Women in Engineering and IT director Arti Agarwal insisted the move would not lower standards.

“We’re not taking in underperforming students or doing tokenism here,” she told Guardian Australia. “Nobody is getting a free pass … They all have to do all the degree requirements [and] internships.”

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Agarwal said the move was part of the university’s 30-year effort to improve gender equity in engineering, which includes primary school and high school outreach programs and mentoring for female engineers.

“We looked at the performance of Atar and the performance of [grade point average] so a lower Atar did not mean they would get a lower GPA. A higher Atar did not mean they were best in the class,” Agarwal said.

She noted a large number of engineering students gained entrance into the undergraduate degree through other pathways, which often were lower than the year 12 Atar minimum score.

Agarwal said previously that, on average, females received 4-8% of UTS offers to study mechanical engineering/mechatronics. The university expects the score adjustment will increase female study offers to about 20%.

In civil engineering on average 16% of offers are to female students and this could rise to 20%. In computer science 10% of offers are to female students and this could lift to 19%.

According to Engineers Australia, 84% of Australian engineering graduates are men. Female engineers make up 13% of the workforce. Australia faces a looming shortage of engineers.

A 2017 Engineers Australia report found part of the problem was low levels of female high school students were studying the prerequisite subjects. Less than 6% of girls nationally studied physics in year 12, with advanced maths at 6.2%.

Engineers Australia’s professional diversity manager Justine Romanis backed the UTS move.

“We need to be disruptive – what we have been doing to date is just not working,” she said.

She said to attract more females to engineering it was important to plant the seeds early with research backing career discussion with children as young as year 4.

Virginia Singh, who studied a double degree in mechanical engineering and science at Deakin University and now works in the defence industry, does not think it is a good idea. There were two female students in her mechanical engineering course. Singh’s father and brothers are also qualified engineers.

“I don’t necessarily think that it’s the score stopping females from joining engineering, there’s more so a stigma associated with it or Stem in general,” Singh told the Guardian. “There’s a perception that you need a strong Stem and technical background and although you need that, most of the day-to-day work is soft skills as opposed to … technical calculations every day.”

The UTS announcement has attracted some criticism on social media.

Sophie Baker
@SophiesBaked
Replying to @TheTodayShow
As a woman I'm offended! This move reinforces the myth that women as not as smart as men.

2,627
8:54 PM - Aug 28, 2019
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Many universities allocate adjustment points based on disadvantage or illness, but UTS Director of Women in Engineering and IT, Arti Agarwal, said she believed the university would be the first to base them on gender.
So being a woman is a disability now?

August 29, 2019

Godot
@GodotIsW8ing4U
Replying to @smh
If you think the best way to get more women into engineering is to lower the standards, aren’t you kind of openly saying you think female engineers aren’t as good as male engineers

45
7:01 PM - Aug 28, 2019
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In 2016, the Australian National University announced that it was broadening its admission processes for engineering degrees away from reliance on Atar scores towards broader selection criteria.

Atar is a number between 0.00 and 99.95 that indicates a student’s position relative to all the students in their age group.

When some catastrophe happens, and it gets traced back (yeah, right!) to a woman who was given preferential treatment with test scores, just WHOM is going to take responsibility for that? Or will all future engineering projects be required to be a team effort so as to mask any shortcomings of particular engineers?

@Logician why are you so sure it will be traced back to a woman, and did you read the part about how they all have to do the degree requirements and internships? if they can do those things and still graduate, what significance remains with the score on one particular test which isn't even the usual deciding score? the reason there are admission tests is to predict who will do well and graduate well. if they still have the same requirements for doing THAT, then there is no point in harping on the bonus points for admission, and if they don't, they won't be IN a position to have a catastrophe traced back to them, because they will not have graduated, or will not have graduated well enough to be hired in such a position. so i do not get what shortcomings you are imagining? the graduates will have no such shortcomings, and if they do, it won't be traceable to stupid bonus points. they apply only to admission, nothing else.

g

@genessa
It's just a bunch of B.S. being done in a vain attempt to be politically correct and nothing more than that! If no special considerations are being given out, then why the bonus points for being a woman? You can't have it both ways now, either hold your piece of cake in your hand or eat it.
I saw the EXACT same thing when I worked for the power company, SoCalEdison. Women were hired into the garage department for the same reasons, for more "diversity", but nearly all of the women who were hired in couldn't cut the mustard and transferred to other departments. Debbie Hammer worked her way up to a garage foreman position, and never successfully passed her mechanic's test! She didn't know the first thing about how to troubleshoot anything electrical on a car or truck, didn't understand basic hydraulic or electrical theory, couldn't tell you what the Otto Cycle was or much of anything else! She could do an oil change and air up tires or wash a car and that was about it. She was not mechanically inclined at all, so someone who was had to baby sit her all of the time until she got the foreman's gig and didn't have to turn a wrench after that. Janet Wingfield was the same way, she didn't even know enough to disconnect the battery BEFORE changing the alternator on an engine! She had sparks flying and almost fried the wiring harness on the truck! What an idiot she was, and all because some retarded liberals thought that it was a good idea to put untrained women into the same arena as well trained and mechanically inclined men. Liz Kern couldn't cut the mustard either, and she got transferred into a paper pushing job. So we're 0 for 3 that I personally know of there.

@Logician hiring and admitting for a chance to study and either succeed or fail at that without bringing a company down are not the same thing, and your personal experience of THREE people is, how shall we put it, a statistically insignificant sample. i am not invalidating your experience. i believe you. but i do not think we can judge this action, which is essentially different anyway, by three women in a company.

g

@genessa
If they haven't already got what it takes to get in without special considerations, then how are they going to make the needed grades on their own?? Don't you see the fallacy there? Those claims that once they are in they will get no more special treatments or considerations, is just so much hogwash.

@Logician i am glad you know all about what they need to succeed in school. it isn't hogwash. i stand by what i have said,

g

@genessa
They need to be smart and have a drive to succeed that is strong enough for them to actually succeed! If they can't show that at the entrance point, where are they going to get it from, Amazon.com or eBay?

@Logician what makes you think that ONE test is the one that is the only way to show it at the entrance point? the article pointed out that it is NOT so. maybe they have the drive and are smart and almost made it on that one test but excelled on everything else, and the 10 points is all they need to go ahead and become excellent from there. there is no need to be snide. amazon and ebay, seriously, get real.

g

@genessa
Well let's see here. When I applied for my job with SCE, I took their basic aptitude test for getting into the garage department. I passed that one just fine. Then while waiting to get hired, they changed the testing procedure, so I had to go back in and take a battery of five additional tests, some of them quite rigorous! Then, they called me in for an additional test for a position that was above entry level in the garage department, because they had an immediate opening there they needed to fill. I passed that one as well and got hired! I was only the second man to be hired in above entry level position in that department, which did not sit very well with some of the co-workers. And they let me know it too! When I left the company in 1999, I was the Lead Mechanic in the Ventura District garage for three years. So that means I'm no dummy and can get the job done. I didn't need anybody feeding me extra points for any reason.

@Logician that's hiring for a job. you have to already know how to do the job. that is not the same thing at ALL as application for education. sure you have to have some of the education already but it's NOT THE SAME.

g

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