A comparison of informatics skills by genders when entering higher education in Hungary

After composing an on-line test based on the National Curriculum an analysis how effectively can students answer questions from different subjects by gender was made. From different towns of Hungary over 60 teachers used the test to see the knowledge level of more than 3900 students having answered these questions, but only those students´ answers were needed who were just entering higher education. Why is this important? Teachers in higher education have to know the knowledge of the entering students, what they have to teach for all of them, do they have to separate the students according to differences in knowledge level, is there any difference in knowledge level by genders, if so, does it require a special course to smooth these differences, or not? Experiences show that boys do better than girls when writing papers at university so this was the starting hypothesis. The analysis of the results (Levene test) showed the variance by gender in some subjects different (p<;0,05). In this case the means could be compared with Welch´s t test, in other cases the means could be compared with T-test. This showed a difference between the means (p<;0,05): the mean of boys´ results in theoretical knowledge, spreadsheet calculation and programming were better than the results of girls so in these three subject found significant knowledge differences by gender were found.