High School Grade Point Average Merits More Focus Than SAT And ACT
From Forbes.com
One basic selling point of the SAT and ACT has always been that they are supposed to predict a student’s likely success in college, serving as a sort of audition for colleges (who have a vested interest in admitting students who will succeed).
The value of those traditional tests has been challenged on many grounds, including the idea that they carry a cultural bias. There has also been repeated research showing that high school grade point averages are actually better predictors of college success.
A major 2009 study by William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michale McPherson and published by Princeton University looked at 150,000 students across almost 70 colleges and universities. It considered six year completion rates rather than just freshman year performance. The researchers found that compared to the SAT, high school GPA was 2.5 times more predictive of success at the most selective universities and 10 times more predictive at the least selective schools.
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research with lead author Theodore Joyce (Baruch College, CUNY Graduate Center) finds much the same results as the 2009 study. The researchers looked at both pre- and post-COVID cohorts, with a total of over 225,000 students followed. They looked at how well the groups did as freshmen, how many continued for a second year, and college graduation rates. Write the researchers, “Our results underscore the dominance of HSGPA [high school grade point average] as the most important predictor of student success at this public university system.”