The survey data suggest that male students are more
“wasteful” with the multiple allowed tries than female students, in that they are more likely to enter “random stuff.”
However, two immediate inferences are not true: that male students would solve less problems and use more tries. Grading data show that male students on the average eventually
solved 38140 problems, while female students solved
38930 problems. Both male and female students used an
average of 2.10.3 attempts for each solved problem. Also,
the distributions are virtually indistinguishable: both male
and female students on the average solved 220 problems in
the first attempt and 80, 40, 20, and 10 problems in the
second through fifth attempts, respectively.