The Effectiveness of Intellectual and Non-Intellectual Factors in Predicting Achievement for Business Students

Abstract

THIS STUDY is designed to scrutinize the effecI tiveness of both intellectual and non-intell e c t u a 1 factors in predicting grades for business adminis tration students and is based primarily upon the re sults of an earlier report by Watley and Martin (2). Using 158 freshman males who enrolled in the Col lege of Business Administration at the University of Denver in the fall quarters of 1958 and 1959, unusu al results were obtained that seemed worthy of fur ther investigation. First, the importance of high school rank as a predictor of academic achievement for business students seemed questionable, and sec ond, the Guilford-Zimmerman Tern per am ent Sur vey (GZTS) traits of Restraint and Thoughtfuln e s s received large beta weights in the regression equa tion and appeared to be two of the most useful vari ables for prediction purposes. Using only the 1959 group of students for determining the multiple cor relation coefficient, these three variables p 1 u s t h e Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) produced an R of .82 with grade averages computed for the freshman year. Cross-validation of these results with the 1958 group of students yielded a validity coefficient of . 52 between predicted grades and grades actually received. While the previous investigation (2) focused at tention upon a single group of freshman males with business majors, the approach taken in this study was the selection of three more restricted sub groups of business students, each group being ana lyzed individually to identify the variable s most use ful for predicting academic achievement. Sixteen business majors were grouped together in the first study to make a single business group.