Predictions of academic performance in graduate and professional school

Abstract

Using a model followed in earlier research, correlations were computed between undergraduate and graduate grade-point averages as well as between these and standard graduate and professional school tests. Approximately 1200 law school students constituted a professional school sample and another 1200 students in mathematics, physics, and chemistry constituted a graduate school sample. Earlier findings were replicated. In addition, it is shown that both graduate and professional school grades form simplex matrices and that early grades are more highly predictable from aptitude tests than later grades. There is evidence for a single simplex matrix extending through the four undergraduate and three post-graduate years only in the law school sample. There are two separate simplex matrices for the two levels in the graduate school sample. Correlations between test scores and undergraduate grades are biased to very low values in the professional school sample by a compensatory selection system, but both aptitude and achievement tests are clearly more highly correlated with freshman than with senior grades in the graduate school sample. In this sample, however, the advanced test in the discipline is more highly correlated with first year graduate grades than with senior grades. These data suggest that the first year in a new academic learning situation represents a greater intellectual challenge than subsequent years.