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eBook details

• Title: Honors Admissions Criteria: How Important are Standardized Tests?(Research Essays) (Essay)
• Author : Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 62 KB

Description

In 2007 I had the rare pleasure of overseeing the transformation of our 45-year-old honors program into an honors college. The entrance requirements for our honors program had been designed to maximize the number of participants and largely boiled down to whether the student was interested in pursuing honors. However, admission to the Honors College included a scholarship and thus required more discernment in admission standards. Thus, I began to review the entrance requirements for ten honors colleges in Texas and its surrounding states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Not surprisingly, most other universities focused on high school grade point average (GPA) and standardized test scores. The general practice among the schools was admission to the honors college for students in the top 10% of their high school graduating class, a 27 or higher composite score on the ACT, and 1200 or higher on the math and reading portions of the SAT. As a result we used those numbers as rough benchmarks for what we wanted our "typical" Honors College student to look like. In addition to these numbers, we added an interview to the selection process. One of the benefits of starting a new program is that research questions are also policy questions upon which action can be taken. Investigating the success and failure of our first cohort had the potential to help us shape our entrance criteria in order to enhance the likelihood of success for future students. Whereas an established program might be resistant to change, a new program can be more flexible. Thus, the ability to predict the performance of first-year students was an exciting area to study. However, as Khe (2007) pointed out, the issue of what criteria best predict success is a large and complex question that has led to no shortage of debate. The literature surrounding the question of entrance criteria contains a wide range of opinion. Wolfe and Johnson (1995) found that 19% of the variance in freshman GPA could be accounted for by high school GPA. Anastasi (1988) summarized 2000 studies investigating the link between SAT scores and GPA and concluded that the scores predicted 18% of the variance in freshman GPA. Amore recent meta-analysis including research involving over one million students indicated that the SAT is a valid predictor of first-year GPA (Hezlett et al., 2001). On the other hand, Robert Sternberg has long been an opponent of an over-reliance on standardized testing. His claim is that "tests only work for some of the people, some of the time" (Sternberg, 1982; p 157).

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