College Scholastic Progress Patterns as Predictive Indices for Counseling

Abstract

THE PROBLEM of being misled by predictive information is especially important to American higher education at this critical period of rapid ex pansion. Prospective and currently enrolled c o 1 lege students need realistic counseling in regard to their college plans. This is a report of the devel opment of some college scholastic progress pat terns which may be more valid and more useful as predictive information for counseling than that which is presently available. The basic idea underlying the development o f this information is that of describing the actual in-college performance of former students of a college and then using this description as a pattern for the expected progress of prospective or cur rently enrolled students of that college. The de scription of former students was obtained by se lecting various homogeneous groups of former stu dents and then charting the progress of each group over a four semester period. The progress of each group included both an achievement aspect and a persistence aspect. Achievement is shown by the proportion of each group in each of four grade-point average ranges. The persistence as pect is shown by the proportion of each group leaving at various times over a two year period. Whether or not these departures are voluntary i s also shown. The development of these progress patterns be gan with two basic premises: 1) that the two fac tors most significantly related to college scholas tic progress are previous academic achievement and scholastic ability; and 2) that the scholastic progress made by prospective or currently enrolled students of a college will be essentially the same as progress made by previously enrolled students of that college. Many studies have reported the relationship of the two factors, ability and previous achievement, to college grade-point averages. Travers** has reviewed predictive studies of this kind at all edu cational levels, and Garrett2 has done so for pre dictions in liberal arts colleges. An aspect of progress other than college grade point average, however, is that of staying power or, stated negatively, tendency to leave college. Table I presents some evidence to show the significance of the relationship of the two factors, ability and pre vious achievement, to staying power or tendency to leave college. In Table L, consider the men of low scholastic promise, that is, those who scored a mong the lowest third on the College Qualification Test and who earned less than a C average the first semester: 29.2% of this group left voluntarily be fore the junior year as compared with 16. 9% of the men with high scholastic promise; likewise 54. 6% of the low scholastic promise group was dropped as compared with only 1.2% of the high scholastic promise group. The effect of previous achievement and scholastic ability on departures is also shown for the women. In the case of women, however, ability and previous achievement have little effect upon voluntary departures. Evidence in support of the second premise, con cerning the relationship of the progress of current ly enrolled students to former students, is presented in Tables n and III. Table n shows the similarities from year to year for the grade-point average as pect of progress. There was little variation in mean grade-point averages from year to year over a 10 year period. For example, consider the sec ond column in Table n. This column shows 10 dif ferent groups of freshman men in the College of Letters and Science, each group being present for the second semester in the year shown. The range of the mean grade-point averages shown in the third column is 2. 22 to 2. 32. There is no trend upward or downward in terms of grade-point average, but there is an upward trend in the size of the groups, reflecting enrollment increases. Each of these groups is, of course, quite heterogeneous in re spect to academic background, scholastic ability, and many other factors. The columns for s o p h o mores, juniors, and seniors similarly show little variation in mean grade-point averages from year to year. Furthermore, differences between the mean grade-point averages of the four classes re presented are essentially the same from year to