Academic performance tends to deteriorate during the transition from high school to post-secondary education. In this study, our goal was to investigate whether the degree of this performance deterioration differs across the four subtypes of perfectionism from the 2 × 2 model of perfectionism. Samples of 392 university students and 946 college…

Paradigm shift is a significant modification of the core assumptions and methods of experimentation in a scientific discipline. The field of education, at all levels, has undergone tremendous change recently, precipitated by extraordinary demand for high quality and meaningful sustainable education at all levels across the globe. The national…

This paper explores how fairness was conceptualised by those responsible for admission to highly selective undergraduate courses at 17 universities in England. Fairness was conceptualised principally with reference to the traditional "meritocratic equality of opportunity" paradigm, which holds that university places should go to the most…

The present investigation examined instructor immediacy behaviors, students' perceptions of those behaviors, and student math anxiety in Chinese classrooms. Consistent with the American college classroom, a simple causal chain was anticipated in which instructor immediacy behaviors positively induced a psychological response to immediacy, which…

During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

Graduate school recommendations are an important part of admissions in higher education, and natural language processing may be able to provide objective and consistent analyses of recommendation texts to complement readings by faculty and admissions staff. However, these sorts of high-stakes, personal recommendations are different from the…

This paper examines the relative merits of early and delayed offer schemes in attracting under-represented students to university. Following the introduction of a demand-driven system and the establishment of national growth and equity targets, Australian universities have increased the number of offers made to students before the release of…

Purpose: Aspects of intellectual competence would not be sufficient for quality teaching that requires a mix of intellectual and personal qualities. The purpose of this paper was to elicit personal attributes of teachers' college applicants. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative case study consisted of 99 participants aged 20-24 years of…

The present study explored the long-term impact of admission policies at two aspiring research institutions in Texas. Six years of longitudinal institutional data were analyzed for all full-time first time in college undergraduate students at both universities. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to identify relationships and…

Higher education is facing a conundrum relevant to the field of educational development: expectations regarding entrance criteria and graduation attributes are changing simultaneously. Biggs' model of constructive alignment can be used to analyze the challenges presented by these shifts in expectation and help educational developers…

This paper presents the results of a model that simulates the effects of varying preferential admissions policies on the academic profile of a set of 35 small liberal arts colleges. An underlying assumption is that all schools in the set use the same ratio of preferential to non-preferential admissions. The model predicts that even drastic changes…

Equity in higher education is mostly related to the context in which it is discussed. Most commonly, equity is sought for enhancing access to higher education for under-represented groups such as minorities, low income groups, or any other type of disadvantaged group of people. The plethora of research in this area mostly focuses on different…

No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based…

The use of categorical dependent variables with the classical linear regression model (CLRM) violates many of the model's assumptions and may result in biased estimates (Long, 1997; O'Connell, Goldstein, Rogers, & Peng, 2008). Many dependent variables of interest to educational researchers (e.g., professorial rank, educational attainment) are…

University entrance criteria can be a contentious topic, particularly in respect of equity. In this paper we discuss studies which demonstrate that revisions of entrance criteria which are designed with no explicit reference to equity issues can have a surprisingly positive impact on the fractions of disadvantaged subgroups admitted. We…