within the larger African American population. East Asian Americans of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent score the highest on average, with the difference primarily on mathematics subtests, in all scholastic standardized tests such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, USMLE exams and IQ tests followed by White Americans who score in the intermediate range. Hispanic American and African American scores tend to follow White scores. U.S. students as a whole have in general attained average scores on the International PISA test while other wealthy industrialized developed East Asian countries, such as China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, achieve the highest top scores. However, compared with children in some less developed countries like Benin where some children, especially girls, end their education after the elementary level, education in the United States is compulsory to age 16 regardless of race or class. It is anticipated that over half of public education students will be required to pass standards-based assessments which expect that all students to be at least exposed to algebra by high school and exit prepared for college. Researchers have not reached consensus about the causes of the academic achievement gap; instead, there exists a wide range of studies that cite an array of factors, both cultural and structural, that influence student performance in school. Sociologist Annette Lareau suggested that students who lack middle-class cultural capital and have limited parental involvement are likely to have lower academic achievement than their better resourced peers. Other researchers suggest that academic achievement is more closely tied to race and socioeconomic status and have tried to pinpoint why. Gender achievement gap For the past fifty years, there has been a gap in the educational achievement of males and females in the United States, but which gender has been disadvantaged has fluctuated over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s, data showed girls trailing behind boys in a variety of academic performance measures, specifically in test scores in math and science. Data in the last twenty years shows the general trend of girls outperforming boys in academic achievement in terms of class grades across all subjects and college graduation rates, but boys scoring higher on standardized tests and being better represented in the higher-paying and more prestigious job fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Male students consistently achieved worse school marks than female students from 1913 to 2011 in all countries for which there