High-school grades are often viewed as an unreliable criterion for college admissions, owing to differences in grading standards across high schools, while standardized tests are seen as methodologically rigorous, providing a more uniform and valid yardstick for assessing student ability and achievement. The present study challenges that…

This study examines undergraduate students' academic achievement and its association with students' involvement with learning, students' relationships with faculty and students' relationships with peers at a Midwestern public University. To examine students' academic achievement, this study uses three years of data (2003-05) collected through the…

Although academic ability is the most important explanatory variable in studies of student learning, researchers control for it with a wide array and combinations of proxies. The authors investigated how the proxy choice affects estimates of undergraduate student learning by testing over 150 specifications of a single model, each including a…

Although the University of California, Berkeley has increased efforts to involve undergraduates in scientific research, little data exists regarding the number of undergraduate researchers. The University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) presents an opportunity to investigate the extent of undergraduate research involvement at…

Objective: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with poor inhibition of prepotent responses and deficits in distractor inhibition, but relatively few studies have addressed inhibitory control of proactive interference (PI) in individuals with ADHD. Thus, the goal of the present study was to evaluate resistance to spatial…

Studied the accuracy and trends of deviation noted in undergraduates' self-reported Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and grade point average (GPA) values. Results for 89 undergraduates show that students had highly reliable ratings of cumulative GPA, but the overall accuracies of self-reported SAT scores were considerably lower than the accuracy…

An empirical study was conducted to gain an understanding of the motivations of undergraduate students in attending lectures. Students were highly heterogeneous regarding their reported lecture attendance motivations, with two segments representing prototypical extremes. The student group labelled "idealists" in this study reported genuinely…

The idea that one's competencies are as important as one's qualifications has gained acceptance in both business and academia. Business organizations have developed sophisticated management systems around employee competence. There are education assessment tools that help ascertain students' competencies. In this study, the authors investigated…

This study examined the influence of academic self-efficacy and social support on the academic success of Indian-American and Caucasian-American undergraduate students. 200 Indian-American and Caucasian-American students completed a demographic form and five surveys. The data showed that academic self-efficacy had a significant effect on college…

The effect of grade inflation on the reliability of undergraduate grade point averages at a university was examined. It was shown that there has been some decline in reliability, but this is ameliorated by the use of plus and minus attachments to grades. (JKS)

This study investigated the relationship between test anxiety and academic performance in 4,000 undergraduate and 1,414 graduate students and found a significant but small inverse relationship between test anxiety and grade point average (GPA) in both groups. Low-test-anxious undergraduates averaged a B+, whereas high-test-anxious students…

This study examined the change in term grade point average (GPA) from 1974 through 2004 for 368,282 undergraduate student records at a large, research-extensive university in the Southeast. Descriptive analyses showed an increase in term GPA and average SAT scores over the 31-year period. Although average SAT and GPA increased, standard deviations…

Many studies have acknowledged a shift from elite to mass participation in Australian higher education over the last decade. As the diversity of the student intake rises there is a growing interest in the factors predicting their success or failure. This article identifies a set of variables predicting University of Western Sydney (UWS) student…

This study examined the demographic, pre-college, environmental, and college factors that impact students' interests in and decisions to earn a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degree among students attending a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). Results indicated that Hispanic students were well represented among STEM…

Critical thinking has been conceptualized as a two-factor system in which critical thinking ability and critical thinking disposition combine to determine actual thinking performance. The present study used confirmatory factor analysis to investigate such a two-factor model empirically. One hundred ninety-eight Purdue University undergraduates…