@ucbalumnus, thank you for sanity checking my comprehension; I scanned the abstract while sipping my coffee, and wasn’t planning on lifting the hood on the paper. I guess its main point is that correlation changes depending on the group being considered, which is somewhat interesting.
But, perhaps you could point me in the right direction regarding studies that show higher correlation of HSGPA to college GPA (vs SAT to college GPA). I only ran into Hiss’ study (the one from Bates - which is test optional).
Re: other factors, I’m a fan of grit myself. Makes itself evident on the field, in the class room, in the workplace (and even in situations requiring care/sympathy). Curious if it is sufficiently represented in GPA or if we need these other metrics to gauge it properly…
It doesn’t say how the admissions people define success in college. If you’re not using FYGPA, then what is it? It sounds like it could be circular self congratulations: admissions people redefine success in college in order to prove the applicants they admitted were successful.
@sylvan8798
Meanwhile much of the world seems focused on how to get into the ivies when we have a world full of these pressing issues. If Sylvan can help these students reach a functioning independence, you have accomplished a lot! Perhaps we should spend more time identifying educational programs to assist these students. Do the ivy applicants really need assistance?
I tried tutoring once in an inner city Jr. HS. Students would just walk into my tiny office and make physical threats to students for turning in the class attendance report or some other perceived Jr High crime. There was no adult control. Thirteen year-olds were running the school. In that adolescent mayhem I found a Greek student who loved math, but was having problems with his English because they were word problems. When the language was explained, he did the math in his head. The teacher cared, but had no time to identify the problem.
As usual, I digress, but how many human capital resources are we throwing away by failure to better fund public education?
What sort of perspective student attitude would you like displayed on a college application?
You can’t quantify it, but interviews, essays, special awards, demonstrable secondary school projects, one MIGHT even consider long distance running as a display of grit when it is done with commitment and not to fill a space on your application. This should keep college admissions personnel from being replaced by robots in the near future. :bz
I’m sure you are a robotic search engine and I thank you! Thank you UCB!
About forty years ago, the SAT people would send “validity studies” to participating colleges as a standard operating procedure. The reports I saw tested the college students’ freshmen, sophomore, and junior year college GPAs against a battery of possible explanatory variables to measure the strength of relationships. The tested explanatory variables available at that time were secondary school GPA, verbal SAT, math SAT,and math achievement (MACH) . As this was an old style STEM school, the verbal SAT did not indicate a significant relationship with the college GPA. The (MACH) score was co-linear with the math SAT score, but the MACH had the stronger influence. The final results indicated that the GPA variance at this STEM college (largely first generation college students) were best explained by HS GPA and MACH variances, but only for the first two years.
The “error term,” (i.e., the unexplained variance) was over 50% in the first year and about 75% in the second year. The tests have changed, but it does not appear that the basic direction of the evidence has changed. We need to understand better evidence which is not so readily put into a metric. Admissions is still an art. There is something about human nature that permits us to hide behind data in order to defend college admissions decisions. The ivies problem exemplifies this as students and parents chase their quantifiable tails.
This problem is not new and not likely to go away. It’s a little like too much sugar in your food. It might not be good for you, but it taste good, especially when you are really hungry. :bz
Ivy League has retention rate in the upper 90%. Almost everyone, who is accepted, graduates. The dropouts start Facebook or relocate to a different country.
Why would Ivy worry about Predictors of (college) Success? How do Ivys define success? Almost every student graduates and almost every graduate gets a great salary, except those who go into graduate schools, government jobs, or non-profits.
I had 3.0 gpa and 99.9% SAT, and I also got slightly less than 3.0 gpa in college. Therefore, I am pretty sure GPA in high school is a better predictor of academic success in college. Lol. To this day, I can only study when there is more than grade on the line. Note if my parents were paying a lot of money for my education, I probably would have studied a little bit harder, but I went to college and post College for basically free, so I felt I could read the books I wanted to read and work to gain practical experience rather than study a lot.
It’s very tricky. Although students may enter college thinking that “professional success” is one of their most important goals in life, their views may evolve as their lives progress. Five years out, a graduate well on the road to professional success may choose to follow his/her significant other to another city, where the job prospects in the graduate’s own field are limited. Ten or fifteen years out, a highly successful graduate may choose to drop out of the workforce for a while or scale back his/her career because of the demands of raising children. Highly educated people may choose “lesser” jobs that allow flexibility in scheduling rather than more important jobs that do not. In this generation, both men and women make these kinds of choices. And I don’t think they represent failure. They represent well-thought-out choices by sensible adults.
If the question is what adcoms look for, it’s not predictors of future professional success. They’re attuned to the college years. Nor are they looking for admitees who will all drive themselves batty competing for 4.0.
Some just can’t stretch their thinking past career prep and GPA. Adcoms at top schools are looking for certain qualities.
The vast majority of applicants to elite schools don’t live in a hell hole and have faced nothing that would indicate if they have grit or not. No fault of theirs.