A UMass-Amherst research claims the Connecticut Academic Performance Test is extremely predictive of college success - even more so than the SAT:
Stephen Coelen, a researcher from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, tracked 32,653 members of the Class of 1998, comparing how well they did as sophomores on CAPT to how many applied to, enrolled in and did well in college. On every measure, he found the higher the CAPT score, the more students were likely to go to college, avoid remedial courses in college, get higher grade point averages in college and graduate.When matched against SATs — the College Board exam students take to predict college success, Coelen said both exams helped explain student success in college. Of the two, Coelen said CAPT "was always correct. SAT was not always correct.
Interesting. The "going to college" part could, I think, be affected by the possibility that those who score high on CAPT in 10th grade spend the next couple of years being groomed by teachers for college. If their CAPT scores affect their high school class placement or treatment in any way, then it wouldn't be surprising that CAPT would correlate with college attendence - it would be one of the predictors of it.
Interesting also to see that the CAPT apparently has a high positive correlation with college grades, but given the outcry we hear these days about grade inflation, one wonders if this is really a positive thing about the exam.
Commissioner of Higher Education Valerie Lewis said the study proves the value of CAPT in predicting college success and should be recognized by college admission staffs as a valuable piece of information when they admit students.Lewis also found it startling that 10 percent of students who score very high on CAPT never show up in college. That means some talent is going untapped and underdeveloped...
I find 10 percent startlingly low We're not being told what "very high" means, nor do we know the shape of the distribution. The study was composed of around 32,000 kids; if "very high" means the top 5% of scorers, we're talking about less than 200 smart kids from Connecticut in that graduating year who passed on college. I would think that family issues, financial issues, health issues, and lifestyle issues would affect that preclude college would affect at least 10 percent, maybe more. These are people, not automatons, and if they were that smart, they may have well decided that they wanted to do something other than pay thousands of dollars a year for additional education.
Posted by kswygert at January 11, 2006 05:51 PM