This study illuminates the male advantage in test-based admissions to higher education. In contrast to many other countries, admission tests in Germany are optional, and test-free programs are ...available. This context offers a unique opportunity to investigate whether the male advantage in test-based admissions is caused by gender differences in test performance or in test participation. We use novel register data for the whole population of 300,000 applicants to highly selective and prestigious medical programs in Germany. We find that men perform better in tests and that female applicants are more likely to withdraw from admission tests. Both differences, however, depend on high school grade point average (GPA): The male advantage in test performance emerges only among test-takers with a lower GPA, and female applicants’ stronger test avoidance appears only among women with a medium GPA. Ultimately, both mechanisms contribute to a male advantage in test-based admissions (ceteris paribus of GPA), with better test performance being the major source for male applicants’ higher admission chances. As a consequence, we find the female advantage in school performance and the male advantage in test-based admissions almost neutralize each other.
The main goal of this study is to show that the association between university entrance score and first-year students' academic performance varies randomly across courses after controlling for ...students' sociodemographic, schooling trajectory and motivational variables. The sample consists of 2697 first-year students who were enrolled in 54 courses at a Portuguese public university in 2015/16. Multilevel modelling of academic performance suggests that 34% of variability in grade point average is due to differences among courses and that 80% of such variability is explained by the field of study, whether the university is the student's first choice, and the student's gender, age and parents' level of education. In addition, the results corroborate that the university entrance score is the strongest predictor of first-year academic performance.
In early spring 2020 the vast majority of US colleges and schools closed for the year due to COVID‐19 with no clear direction on when or how these institutions will reopen for in‐person instruction. ...School closures and the associated health concerns haulted large scale admissions testing and required alternative models such as remote proctoring at home, additional flexibility in test sites and administrative conditions, and additional testing dates for the fall. It is clear that access to admissions testing has been greatly reduced despite these efforts resulting in extended deadlines in graduate admissions and the wide‐scale adoption of test‐optional polcies in undergraduate admissions. This paper traces the efforts undertaken by admissions testing programs to adapt to COVID‐19 and the measurement issues which emerge from these efforts.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented number of higher education institutions adopted test-optional admissions policies. The proliferation of these policies and the criticism of standardized ...admissions tests as unreliable predictors of applicants’ postsecondary educational promise have prompted the reimagining of evaluative methodologies in college admissions. However, few institutions have designed and implemented new measures of applicants’ potential for success, rather opting to redistribute the weight given to other variables such as high school course grades and high school GPA. We use multiple regression to investigate the predictive validity of a measure of non-cognitive, motivational-developmental dimensions implemented as part of a test-optional admissions policy at a large urban research university in the United States. The measure, composed of four short-answer essay questions, was developed based on the social-cognitive motivational and developmental-constructivist perspectives. Our findings suggest that scores derived from the measure make a statistically significant but small contribution to the prediction of undergraduate GPA and 4-year bachelor’s degree completion. We also find that the measure does not make a statistically significant nor practical contribution to the prediction of 5-year graduation.
The present study examined individual differences in everyday attention failures. Undergraduate students completed various cognitive ability measures in the laboratory and recorded everyday attention ...failures in a diary over the course of a week. The majority of attention failures were failures of distraction or mind wandering in educational contexts (in class or while studying). Latent variable techniques were used to perform analyses, and the results suggested that individual differences in working memory capacity and attention control were related to some but not all everyday attention failures. Furthermore, everyday attention failures predicted SAT scores and partially accounted for the relation between cognitive abilities and SAT scores. These results provide important evidence for individual differences in everyday attention failures as well as for the ecological validity of laboratory measures of working memory capacity and attention control. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures, and 2 footnotes.)
College Admission Tests and Social Responsibility Koljatic, Mladen; Silva, Mónica; Sireci, Stephen G.
Educational measurement, issues and practice,
12/2021, Letnik:
40, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this article we address the mounting criticism and rejection of standardized tests used in the selection of students for college or university education. Admission tests are being increasingly ...demonized in many parts of the world and many colleges and universities are dropping tests for selection purposes, claiming the tests are detrimental to fair selection. The testing industry is at the center of this criticism and is accused of maintaining, and even facilitating, the social ills associated with admissions testing, much like iconic business corporations were accused of supporting unfair labor practices in the 1990s. The response of some business corporations to those criticisms was to embrace corporate social responsibility and increase transparency and accountability in their operations. Unfortunately, such acceptance of responsibility and increased transparency have not emerged in the testing industry. We believe the legitimacy of admission tests will continue to be challenged until the testing industry adopts a new way of conducting their business to regain the goodwill of relevant stakeholders in society that so far have been largely ignored.
Given the well-documented failings in mathematics education in many Western societies, there has been an increased interest in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of mathematical achievement. ...Recent research has proposed the existence of an Approximate Number System (ANS) which allows individuals to represent and manipulate non-verbal numerical information. Evidence has shown that performance on a measure of the ANS (a dot comparison task) is related to mathematics achievement, which has led researchers to suggest that the ANS plays a critical role in mathematics learning. Here we show that, rather than being driven by the nature of underlying numerical representations, this relationship may in fact be an artefact of the inhibitory control demands of some trials of the dot comparison task. This suggests that recent work basing mathematics assessments and interventions around dot comparison tasks may be inappropriate.
The association between GRE scores and academic success in graduate programs is currently of national interest. GRE scores are often assumed to be predictive of student success in graduate school. ...However, we found no such association in admission data from Vanderbilt's Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity (IMSD), which recruited historically underrepresented students for graduate study in the biomedical sciences at Vanderbilt University spanning a wide range of GRE scores. This study avoids the typical biases of most GRE investigations of performance where primarily high-achievers on the GRE were admitted. GRE scores, while collected at admission, were not used or consulted for admission decisions and comprise the full range of percentiles, from 1% to 91%. We report on the 32 students recruited to the Vanderbilt IMSD from 2007-2011, of which 28 completed the PhD to date. While the data set is not large, the predictive trends between GRE and long-term graduate outcomes (publications, first author publications, time to degree, predoctoral fellowship awards, and faculty evaluations) are remarkably null and there is sufficient precision to rule out even mild relationships between GRE and these outcomes. Career outcomes are encouraging; many students are in postdocs, and the rest are in regular stage-appropriate career environments for such a cohort, including tenure track faculty, biotech and entrepreneurship careers.
The natural history of unruptured cerebral aneurysms has not been clearly defined.
From January 2001 through April 2004, we enrolled patients with newly identified, unruptured cerebral aneurysms in ...Japan. Information on the rupture of aneurysms, deaths, and the results of periodic follow-up examinations were recorded. We included 5720 patients 20 years of age or older (mean age, 62.5 years; 68% women) who had saccular aneurysms that were 3 mm or more in the largest dimension and who initially presented with no more than a slight disability.
Of the 6697 aneurysms studied, 91% were discovered incidentally. Most aneurysms were in the middle cerebral arteries (36%) and the internal carotid arteries (34%). The mean (±SD) size of the aneurysms was 5.7±3.6 mm. During a follow-up period that included 11,660 aneurysm-years, ruptures were documented in 111 patients, with an annual rate of rupture of 0.95% (95% confidence interval CI, 0.79 to 1.15). The risk of rupture increased with increasing size of the aneurysm. With aneurysms that were 3 to 4 mm in size as the reference, the hazard ratios for size categories were as follows: 5 to 6 mm, 1.13 (95% CI, 0.58 to 2.22); 7 to 9 mm, 3.35 (95% CI, 1.87 to 6.00); 10 to 24 mm, 9.09 (95% CI, 5.25 to 15.74); and 25 mm or larger, 76.26 (95% CI, 32.76 to 177.54). As compared with aneurysms in the middle cerebral arteries, those in the posterior and anterior communicating arteries were more likely to rupture (hazard ratio, 1.90 95% CI, 1.12 to 3.21 and 2.02 95% CI, 1.13 to 3.58, respectively). Aneurysms with a daughter sac (an irregular protrusion of the wall of the aneurysm) were also more likely to rupture (hazard ratio, 1.63; 95% CI, 1.08 to 2.48).
This study showed that the natural course of unruptured cerebral aneurysms varies according to the size, location, and shape of the aneurysm. (Funded by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare in Japan and others; UCAS Japan UMIN-CTR number, C000000418.).
Seldom have comparative studies of educational assessment systems been undertaken, especially regarding their standard setting procedures. This study examines the effects of governance structures on ...the power relations in standard setting in the dominant school-leaving or university-entrance examinations. We present acritical analysis of the published research and policy documents, including sense-checking with senior assessment practitioners from 22 jurisdictions. The nature of standard setting systems in three cases of Ireland, the USA and India are described in detail to showcase the differences between the following three models of governance systems: nationalised, commercial market and quasi-market. The contribution of this article, then, is to describe the three models of governance systems, to classify the 22 jurisdictions using the three models, and to generate propositions inductively. Thus, the article provides aconceptual basis for extension of this work to other cases to advance the literature cumulatively by theory-building.
PDF
