Applied Research Methods

The Case of Student Admissions

Admissions representatives at a large university are concerned with reports they’re hearing about the validity and reliability of the standardized test that they use for helping determine admission to their freshman class. Given that, they want to investigate alternate means of determining who will be admitted to their university.

After careful consideration and a lot of research, the admissions counselors determine that one of the best predictors of undergraduate grade point average (GPA) is a student’s high school GPA. Knowing that, they search through their databases and find information about the high school GPA and the first year GPA for all students admitted in the past five years. After formatting the data and running it through a statistical program, they set out to try to determine if the predictive ability of the high school GPA is accurate.

1. What is the hypothesis that the admissions counselors are investigating?

2. Is there an independent variable and/or a dependent variable? If not, what types of variables are there?

3. What types of data do each of the variables represent?

4. Which statistical test would they use to test their hypothesis?

5. How should the admissions counselors interpret each of these cases? Are there any special precautions or assumptions they should consider?

6. If the admissions counselors were to graphically plot each of these relationships, what would be the general direction of each line?

Case A:

High School Freshman GPA GPA

Pearson High School GPA 1.000 .801 Correlation Freshman GPA .801 1.000

Number High School GPA 1241 1241 Freshman GPA 1241 1241

Case B:

High School Freshman GPA GPA

Pearson High School GPA 1.000 .555 Correlation Freshman GPA .555 1.000

Number High School GPA 1241 1241 Freshman GPA 1241 1241

Case C:

High School Freshman GPA GPA

Pearson High School GPA 1.000 -.980 Correlation Freshman GPA -.980 1.000

Number High School GPA 1241 1241 Freshman GPA 1241 1241