Abstract
Because it is often impractical or impossible to obtain school transcripts or records on subjects, many researchers rely on college students to accurately self-report their academic record as part of their data collection procedures. The purpose of this study is to investigate the validity and reliability of student self-reported academic performance. As expected the study finds overall validity of self-reported test scores to be high. However, correlations between self-reported and actual SAT scores are significantly lower than correlations for self-reported and actual ACT Composite scores. This study also confirms prior research which found that when students are inaccurate in reporting their scores, a disproportionate number of them over-report their scores. Also consistent with other studies, this study finds that lower achieving students for both tests are much less accurate when reporting their scores.
Highlights
Survey research is perhaps the most common data collection method in higher education as institutions ramp up assessment efforts for both improvement and accountability
As with the other two indicators of accuracy, these results provide support for the cognitive distortion view in that it appears that students are significantly more accurate in recalling their ACT score than students who try to recall each of their three SAT scores
This study confirmed prior research which found that when students are inaccurate in reporting their scores, a disproportionate number of them over-report their scores indicating that some students may systematically exaggerate their scores
Summary
Survey research is perhaps the most common data collection method in higher education as institutions ramp up assessment efforts for both improvement and accountability. Given that it is often impractical or impossible to obtain school transcripts or records for each student; many researchers rely on college students to accurately self-report their academic record as part of the research data collection procedures (Kuncel et al 2005). Accuracy of self-reported data has been investigated for many years in the higher education literature. The type of self-reported data investigated in this line of research can generally be categorized as two types: attitudinal and factual (Tourangeau et al 2000). Attitudinal data come from self-reports of beliefs or opinions that are generally not verifiable by an outside source (e.g., ‘‘How satisfied are you with your academic advising?’’). Attitudinal variables are most often used as predictors of important student outcomes in higher education research, so the predictive validity of the data is the primary concern (e.g., Braxton et al 1988)
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