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The Academic Progress of Male and Female First Year University Students Compared

Research findings on the relative progress of male and female university students are few; even Miller's (I970) valuable review of research on student progress says little about the sex variable. The findings also tend to lack precision; the overall success rate or 'score' of men is often compared with that of women, and this is meaningless unless considered in relation to other variables. Women, for example, are most strongly represented in the arts faculty, where the percentage of first class degrees awarded is low, less well in pure science, where this percentage is high, and almost absent from engineering, where the percentage tends to be highest of all. Until recently there was also a strong tendency for a smaller proportion of women than of men to take honours courses in the faculties of arts and pure science (Nisbet, 1970), though recent changes in the nomenclature and provision of courses now make generalisation difficult. We do know, however, that of those women who enter the honours schools in arts and pure science a smaller proportion gain good honours degrees than in the case of the men (Forster, I959; Mountford, 1956; McCracken, 1969). Looking at the failures, we find constant hints in the research literature that, overall, a slightly greater percentage of women than of men graduate without delays and a slightly smaller percentage withdraw for academic reasons (Nisbet, 1970; Mountford, 1956; Forster, 1959; Robbins, 1963; UGC, 1968; Cox, 1971). The UGC report especially demonstrates that this occurs in most fields of study. Few of these differences at the bottom end were statistically significant, and any overall advantage to the women may in part be due to the heavy weighting of women in arts (with low failure rates) and low weighting in engineering (with a high failure rate). It should also be noted that the proportion of women withdrawing for other than academic reasons is greater than for men. In this article, however, we are concerned with comparing the academic progress of men and women students between the Advanced