The Graduate Record Examination vs. Other Measures of Aptitude and Achievement

In 1937 the Graduate Schools of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Co lumbia Universities sponsored a new testing program for graduate students. This project, designated as the Graduate Record Examination, was organized in collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Since its inception the program has steadily broadened its scope, so that by 1946 a total of 120 graduate and professional schools had taken official action either requiring or recommending the Examination. Over 600 centers have now been established at colleges where accredited Examiners are prepared to make the Examination available to candidates. During the fiscal year ending July 1, 1946 nearly 53,000 students were tested in various proj ects carried on by the Graduate Record Office. In May 1946 fifty-two colleges and universities, widely distributed over the nation, cooperated in the Inquiry into Post-war Conditions in American Colleges by administering to all of their graduating seniors and second semester sophomores the new form of the Graduate Record Examination now designated as The Tests of General Education. We should present here some of the data available from our own institutional analysis of this Inquiry program. It shall not be our purpose to comment upon the larger general prob lems inherent in the Inquiry, such as the demonstrated relationship between senior and sophomore performance on the examinations, the relationship between the performance of the men and women students, nor the profiles for the subject-matter major groups that might legitimately be constructed but rather, upon the relationships between the Graduate Record Examina tions and other well-recognized tests of ability and school achievement. We shall also study the relationship between these various tests and the so-called criterion of academic achievement, the scholastic grade-average. Much of the data in this paper are of a correlational nature.