<p>What freshmen take varies so much that "predicting" is going to be wildly inaccurate.</p>
<p>For example, S took a course outside his area of strength that is normally taken by more advanced students in that field. He did not get an A; nor does he regret taking the course. Another student took a course normally taken by upperclassmen. She is very glad she did so because the prof has just announced he will no longer teach so he can devote his energies to other activities. Given the vagaries of course choice and the willingness of students to challenge themselves or not, I doubt that SAT, high school GPAs are good predictors or college performance.</p>
<p>Oh, and I had an absolutely disastrous freshman year (partly due to language problems). I survived, graduated with honors and went on to grad school.</p>
<p>SAT scores add information to the prediction based on high school grades alone. Correlational studies like this suffer from "restriction of range"--because students admitted to college have higher grades and higher SAT scores than the larger group of all students who attended high school--but SAT scores have some incremental value in distinguishing candidates for admission who attended different high schools with possibly different grading standards. </p>
<p>I am not aware of any study that compares students in "hard" college majors (what would those be, maybe Chinese or computer science?) to those in "easy" college majors (what are those in the college you know best?). Perhaps self-selection of courses by students in college means that most college students have similar grade averages, even if they have different SAT scores.</p>
<p>my daughter had the equivalent of about 2100 SAT ( old SAT plus SATll English)
HEr grades freshman year were fine as far as I know- her school doesn't mail home grades though unless doing poorly-I expect she probably had a low B average.</p>
<p>Most freshmen have no declared majors. Students cope differently with the distribution requirements. Some leave many of these requirements until later, others try to get them out of the way as soon as possible. Some feel that they want to acclimate themselves to college and therefore take courses in their intended major which is usually their area of strength; others are afraid that if they leave off fulfilling the requirements in their areas of weakness, they will have forgotten much of the basic information from high school that is necessary to do well. Some repeat the contents of AP classes, others move on to upper-level courses.</p>
<p>In addition to (already mentioned) differencies in the courseload (area of strength/weakness; taking upper-level classes vs. intro classes; "tough" majors) there is also significant difference in the universities' grading policy and in the student bodies. Thus, the same kid will probably have very different freshman GPA if he will go to Caltech or Uchicago or UMich as opposed to Podunk Uni... so, I would only consider the differencies between student performance within a particular college (and even within a particular major). Even so, I doubt that SATs are very good predictors.</p>
<p>Well they weren't in my family. I got straight Bs my freshman year. And one brother with scores similar to mine (low to mid 700s back in the 70s) got 1 A, 1 B, 1 C and 1 D. I think the D was in a notoriously killer math course. He ended up in Applied Math btw. My grades got better once I figured out what courses I enjoyed taking.</p>
<p>I have read, but don't know where and can't attest to the validity, that the best predictor of college GPA is high school GPA. Of course, there will be exceptions.</p>
<p>That would be true for my S, who has never showed his stuff via standardized tests. Since he's been to two different colleges due to Katrina, he has a little more ability to remove the "which college" variable, although obviously no student can remove that variable.</p>
<p>HS GPA 94uw/122w on 100-pt scale. College GPA 3.73 and 3.67 at two different schools with a science-heavy load at both (top 20 LAC and Tier 1 University). SAT's: 1320. SATII's? You wouldn't want to know.</p>
<p>My college freshman GPA matches pretty well with my SAT score; my SAT's were a bit better, but they're still close. Columbia University did a very small and very casual study of 100 students at the end of their freshman year and correlated that with both SAT math and verbal. Here is an excerpt from the "textbook" for Frontiers of Science, the class for which the study was done.</p>
<pre><code>"[24:] Here is an example of correlation analysis which you might find more interesting. I have collected anonymous data for 100 randomly selected members of the Columbia class of 2008, which includes Verbal and Math SAT scores plus GPA (grade-point average) at the end of their first year at Columbia. The mean values with their associated statistical uncertainties (quoted as errors in the mean -- see Chapter 5) are as follows: Verbal SAT = 691.5 +/- 7.6, Math SAT 695.7 +/- 6.8, and first-year GPA = 3.374 +/- 0.051. These are consistent with the entire class averages.
[25:] The value for the correlation coefficients are r(verbal-GPA) = 0.547 and r(math-GPA) = 0.436; for N=100, the Table shows both are highly significant. For a sample of this size, a value of r>0.35 will occur by chance less than twice in 1,000 trials; values of ~0.4 and ~0.5 are much less likely still. We can clearly say that the correlation is significant.
[26:] Are you worried? Can I use this result to predict your performance before you even take your first Columbia exam? Should we just grant those of you with high SAT scores your degrees now and save a lot of time and energy?
[27:] Clearly not. The data are plotted here: Figure 1: Math SAT vs GPA
</code></pre>
<p>Figure 2: Verbal SAT vs GPA
[28:] Several points are worth noting. First of all, with a sample size of 100, most of the possibilities are represented, and the diagram is sprinkled almost everywhere with points (within the allowed ranges, e.g., SAT scores were, until 2005, always less than or equal to 800). This makes the correlation, although highly statistically significant, less apparent to the eye than in the example above with one fifth the amount of data. A corollary of this fact is that there are students with SAT scores in the low 500s who earn A averages, and students with 750 SATs who have year-end GPAs a full point or more lower. Even students with 800 SAT scores can find themselves with a B average in May. Furthermore, since we have sampled only 10% of the class, this dataset is unlikely to include the most extreme outliers; the combination of perfect SAT scores and C averages, as well as 500 SAT scores and A averages, are not at all unprecedented.
[29:] This illustrates a crucially important idea: a correlation is not predictive for individual cases. It is strictly a statistical statement about how two variables are related in aggregate. Just as correlation is not causation, correlation is not destiny. Just as many different factors contributed to your final SAT scores, many different, and new, factors will contribute to your success at Columbia. "</p>
<p>I don't really know how to put the scatter plots online, so if anyone has any ideas and wants to see them, let me know. There is a positive correlation, but it's not very strong.</p>
<p>Statistically, The College Board has
identified that men score higher on
the SAT, but women have a higher
GPA. Anyone have knowledge why
this is the case?</p>
<p>GPA vs. SAT: no predictor in my D's case. High sAT--average grades.</p>
<p>Just from hanging around with some high school aged boys, I found that if they thought a subject was boring or assignment was stupid, they didn't bother to put out their best effort. Many of the high GPA girls I know would put forth their best efforts no matter what.</p>
<p>I've read that the strongest predictor of college grades is not SAT, but high school grades. The University of California a while back found that the strongest predictor of SAT scores was socio-economic background.</p>
<p>My two kids scored widely apart on the SATs. They both did well in college, though the higher scorer is doing better. On the other hand, they are so different in their approaches, their fields, their personalities, and their ambitions, that I would consider the standardized test performance to be much lower on the list of factors than a dozen other variables -- including how important gpa is to each of them.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The results indicated that
HSGPA was a relatively better predictor of first-year
college grade-point average (FGPA), while the SAT I
was a relatively better predictor of individual college
course grades. The correlations with FGPA, corrected
for shrinkage, restriction of range, and criterion unreliability,
were about the same for HSGPA (.63), SAT II
average (.62) and SAT I (.60). The multiple correlation
of SAT I and SAT II average with FGPA was .63, the
multiple correlation of HSGPA and SAT I with FGPA
was .71, and the multiple correlation of HSGPA and
SAT II average with FGPA was .69. Females generally
had higher correlations than males. Among the ethnic
groups, white and Asian American students had higher
correlations and American Indian students had lower
correlations. Among the three main predictors, HSGPA
had the highest correlation for American Indian,
Hispanic, and white students, and the SAT II average
had the highest correlation for Asian American and
African American students.
<p>The SAT wasn't a good predictor of my college GPA. I earned 690V/780M back in 1991, but my cumulative GPA in electrical engineering at UIUC was 4.13 on a 5.0 scale (equivalent of 3.13 on a 4-point scale). Either my cumulative SAT score should have been some 200 points lower, or I should have graduated with High Honors.</p>
<p>Mucho can be argued pertaining to the SAT-GPA scale.
The average SAT score is near the 1030 range (old).
That is equvilant to a 2.575 GPA. I suspect that the
average FGPA is lower.</p>