Graduate Record Examination as a Predictor of Success in Grad School

All graduate programs endeavor to attract the best students, and one of the major criteria used to decide whether or not to admit a student to a graduate program is the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) score (Sternberg and Williams, 1997). Many programs have cut-off scores, below which students are not admitted, while others take different factors into consideration as well, e.g. Yale. These researchers looked at the empirical value of the GRE as a predictor of various kinds of performance for students in a graduate psychology program. An informal review of 149 studies of the GRE predictive value across various fields of study showed that the GRE, taken by itself, accounted for less than 10 percent of the variation in various criteria of graduate performance against which it was validated (631). Other studies have shown that the GRE can be a good predictor of grades and faculty evaluations for first-year graduate students in psychology. Many government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, use the GRE as a factor when awarding graduate scholarships. From a psychological standpoint, the GRE is an example of psychological theory put into practice, and is based on conventional psychometric ideas of abilities.

A review of the literature by these authors found that tests like the GRE usually provide a moderate amount of information about the performance of first-year students in graduate and professional schools (633). However, they question whether this

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oriented, and that over their combined 45 years of experience, they have found that students with higher GRE scores do better in graduate programs than those with lower GRE scores (575). Roznowski (1998) also critiqued the Sternberg and Williams study, delineated many of the problems involved in trying to correlate GRE scores and graduate program performance. Sample sizes are small, and the range of talent and other criteria are severely restricted in studies involving just one graduate institution. She points out that the strong reputation of Yale University itself results in some self-selection in terms of graduate school applicants, and that information from Yale's website indicates that their acceptance ratio is very limited in the psychology graduate programs - as low as 100:1 in some sub-specialties (570). Compensating selection rules at some institutions, where performance on other predictors is taken into consideration, tend to depress validity coefficients. Roznowski also points out that scores on successive measurements decrease in predictive value over time (571). There is often a passage of from seven to 10 years between GRE scores and faculty ratings, which are usually done for late-career perform

Category: Psychology - G