Behavior Ratings and Scholarship among College Freshmen

Abstract

A slightly modified form of the American Council Rating Scale has been used for admissions purposes at Stanford University for the past eight or ten years. Each entering student is required to have two copies of the scale filled out by those who know him, at least one of these by a secondary school or college teacher or administrator. These blanks are mailed to the University by the persons filling them out. The purpose of the study reported here was to discover the value of the rating scale for predicting the scholastic success of the student in the University. The scale is not used by the Admissions Committee primarily as a scholastic predictor but as an indication of personality characteristics that might be significant in the total development of the student. The traits or habit patterns indicated in the scale are assumed, however, to bear a definite relationship to scholastic success so that the scale relates at least indirectly to scholarship. The specific questions of this study were: What is the relationship of the specific scale ratings to scholarship ? ; and secondly, what is their relationship to other objective data such as intelligence test scores and personality test scores? A further intent of the study was to find the differential values of the five items of the scale in predicting scholarship. All of the entering freshman class of 1933 except those who had failed to complete the first quarter of the freshman year were used as subjects, with Stanford College Aptitude Test scores, Bernreuter Personality Inventory scores and freshman grades as the criteria against which rating scale values were to be evaluated.1 The subjects consisted of 345 freshman men and 193 freshman women, a total group of 538 in which the sampling was complete of those who had entered the second quarter of the freshman year. All but twenty-three of the 538 completed the year so that virtually all of the grade