(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which Kindly Dr. Keeping Up goes even berserker than usual over the things getting said about SATs and especially by state judges in New York. Dear Kindly: One senses you are about to dump on Judge John M. Walker, he whose February 3 opinion made Page 1 of the New York Times and drew naught but plaudits from critics of standardized tests. As a judge, he would not even make a good bookie. Dear Keeping: You mean he has problems with odds and such? Look at it this way. Damon Runyon said never to offer more than 3 to 1 on events involving human beings, but Walker makes it over 1,000,000,000 to 1 that the Empire State is unconstitutionally discriminating against femmes when it relies exclusively upon the Scholastic Aptitude Test for purposes of scholarship awardance. Dear Dr. Up: And how does an average punter get money down on this bet? The Caesars Palace ''sports book'' regrettably fails to feature the judge's proposition, which is that (a) guys score 50 or 60 points higher than dolls on the SATs, (b) statistical theory tells us there is less than one chance in a billion this could result from random fluctuations, so (c) the differential must reflect bias, which (d) means that use of the tests violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, heretofore most famous for enabling lasses to nondiscriminatorily try out for football. Dear Upkeep: Kindly grade the judge's reasoning on a scale of 1 to 100. We give him a 75, inasmuch as he got three parts right but came unglued in (c). Dear Dr. Up: Are you hinting that the 50-point differential might not be causatively rooted in bias? If it reflected ''bias,'' you would think somebody could characterize the nature and origins of the bias, but Walker's opinion never even attempts this or shows signs of thinking it belongs in his argument. He just treats bias as the great residual -- the explanation you reach for when you can't think of any others that are socially acceptable. High on his list of unacceptable explanations, we intuit, are several vouchsafed here quite recently (January 2), the principal one being that the boys taking the test are smarter than the girls. Dear Keep: What about the bias supposedly evidenced in the fact that the ladies score lower on SATs but then go on to get college grades just as good as those of the gents? Yes, Walker tumbled for that one. He seemed oblivious to academic studies stating plain as day that the whole anomaly goes away when you adjust for the fact that the boys take tougher college courses with more severe grading standards -- engineering, for example, instead of education. Dear Dr. Up: And now, the socially unacceptable part we have all been waiting for. Why do girls score lower on SATs? First, because males are more variable than women in intelligence. More males are in the high-IQ ranges, also in the retarded ranges. So you would naturally expect an above-average group like SAT testees to have a disproportionate number of superior males. But even aside from the variability factor, the girls constitute a less elite group than the boys. They are poorer; they include more minority-group members.

Dear Doc: Some evidence, please. As is well known, boys and girls are good at different things. In a group of matched IQs, the girls will demonstrate superior verbal skills and the boys will do better on math. Twenty years ago, you could see some such pattern in the SATs. But beginning in the early Seventies, the universe of test takers became increasingly female -- the fair sex now represents 52% of all testees -- and included more and more marginal female students. So the boys gradually went from a verbal deficit to a ten-point surplus, while also increasing their edge in math (now 40 points). Dear Up: What are the chances that your side will ever win any of these cases? We make it 3 to 1 against.